jobfamilie

Jobfamilie is a term used in human resources management, particularly in Dutch-speaking organizations, to describe a grouping of jobs that share similar functions, responsibilities, and required competencies. A job family provides a framework for classifying positions and planning workforce development across an organization.

The primary purpose is to standardize job descriptions, performance expectations, recruitment, and succession planning. By organizing roles into families, organizations can establish clear career ladders, assign appropriate salary bands, and enable mobility of staff within and across departments.

A typical job family contains multiple levels or grades, with a core set of competencies and, often, specialized skills relevant to that family. Job descriptions within the family align on scope and qualifications, while levels indicate increasing responsibility and remuneration. Job evaluation methods, such as point-factor or ranking approaches, are used to assign levels consistently.

Examples include administrative, IT, finance, engineering, and customer service families. The concept supports workforce planning, competency development, and benchmarking against external markets, and it helps organizations compare roles across sites or subsidiaries.

Issues in managing job families include keeping classifications up to date with evolving roles, avoiding overlap between families, and ensuring fair pay and progression paths. While common in the public sector and large firms, the approach is also used in multinational organizations to maintain internal equity and clarity.