Solving the Job Puzzle: Why Structure Is the Secret to Workforce Agility
Job roles are evolving faster than organizations can redesign them. As business priorities shift, new technologies emerge, and workforce expectations change, HR leaders are being asked to do more than just maintain systems—they're shaping how companies adapt and grow.
In this environment, Job Architecture is gaining visibility as a critical strategic lever. Once considered a back-office tool for classification or compensation, it's now becoming essential for workforce planning, internal mobility, pay equity, and skills-based transformation.
The Alignment Problem: Talking About Roles Without a Shared Language
Organizations often run into trouble not because they lack ambition, but because they lack alignment. Without a clear and shared structure for job families, levels, and progression, even simple questions—like who qualifies for promotion or what a “senior” role really means—can create confusion.
This isn’t just a theoretical issue. Misalignment around roles slows down decision-making, weakens trust in HR processes, and leaves employees unsure of how to grow.
As Sibylle Würthner, Director People at TenneT, emphasized during our conversation at Rethink! HR Tech Berlin 2025, one of the biggest challenges in large organizations is the absence of a shared language around roles. Without a common framework, teams often believe they’re aligned while actually operating with different definitions and expectations. Job Acrhitecture addresses this by introducing a consistent, company-wide role framework that establishes a shared language, ensuring everyone understands responsibilities and expectations in the same way. Her point highlights how critical that mutual understanding is for ensuring consistency, fairness, and clarity across the business.
Too Many Titles, Too Little Structure
Many organizations find themselves managing hundreds of job titles. They were created for a specific need at a specific moment, but few were ever consolidated. This complexity may feel harmless at first, but over time it becomes a serious obstacle to scaling workforce strategy.
Streamlining titles and organizing them into structured job families and levels doesn’t mean reducing nuance. It means enabling comparability and growth. When handled thoughtfully, this simplification supports talent development, transparency, and benchmarking. With solutions such as subtitles, what makes each role unique, does not need to be erased but can be incorporated into the overall structure
TenneT, for example, reduced over 600 distinct jobs into broader master profiles, allowing for a clearer foundation without oversimplifying their organization.
Scalable, But Not One-Size-Fits-All
One of the key challenges of Job Architecture, especially in multinational organizations, is designing for consistency while respecting local laws, regulations, and cultures. What can be rolled out centrally might need legal tailoring in certain regions.
A flexible model enables companies to keep shared job structures and language across borders, while omitting or adapting specific elementswhere legal constraints require it. Examples for the elements, that often get adapted, are grading and compensation. The trick is to hold the structure steady, while bending the delivery.
Rolling It Out Without Rolling Over People
Even a well-designed Job Architecture can land poorly if the rollout feels top-down, overly technical, or disconnected from day-to-day experience. Change management here is not a phase but strategy in itself.
Employees don’t want to feel boxed in. Managers don’t want to lose autonomy. The most effective organizations position the architecture as a support system: it’s there to help people navigate complexity, not create more of it.
TenneT’s team approached this with clarity and even a dose of humor, reminding employees that Job Architecture isn’t about restricting how they express their strengths and contributions - it’s about helping the organization work better behind the scenes.
A Stepping Stone to Skills-Based Work
As companies shift toward skills-based workforce models, Job Architecture becomes even more relevant. As companies shift toward skills-based workforce models, Job Architecture becomes even more relevant. It creates a clear structure that links employees’ skills to business needs, showing where those skills can be applied and how they can grow over time. This makes career development more transparent and enables internal mobility based on potential, not just titles.
The future isn’t about abandoning roles. It’s about redefining them as flexible containers for evolving capabilities. Job Architecture offers the scaffolding to support that shift without letting everything unravel.
Job Architecture Is No Longer Optional
For many companies, Job Architecture has quietly moved from being an HR infrastructure tool to a core component of business agility. It’s what makes internal equity possible, career pathways visible, and strategic workforce planning executable.
Done well, it doesn’t constrain. It clarifies.
You can watch the full interview – recorded live at Rethink! HR Tech 2025 in Berlin – below.
And if you want to explore how Job Architecture can transform your organization — book a free demo and speak with an expert from COLMEIA.
