Explaining Job Families, Job Roles, and Job Codes

The job architecture is the framework that defines how jobs are organized, categorized, and managed within an organization, connecting critical HR elements, such as job hierarchies, profiles, competencies, and skills, into a unified system. This structure is key to talent management and how the objectives and reviews will be tied to the job role expectations in Performance and Goals.

Roles are typically organized in Job Families that define broad job categories in your company. For example, you can create job families for major functions in your company, such as HR or Information Technology, or you can create job families for the major employment levels in your company, such as Exempt Employees or Executives.

Creating job families allows you to establish individual job roles associated with each job family. This, in turn, allows you to associate attributes (such as competencies and skills) with a specific job role.

You can set up your performance review forms to automatically populate the attribute sections of the form with only the competencies and skills relevant to the job role held by the subject of the review form.

Job Roles describe the different types of jobs included in a job family. For example, if you have a job family named Information Technology, you might have individual roles such as:

• IT Manager
• Database Administrator
• System Administrator

Similarly, if you have a job family named Sales, you might include roles such as:

• Sales Manager
• Sales Director
• Sales Operations Manager
• Vice President, Sales

Job Families can have a set of competencies/skills applied to every Job Role. Individual job roles may have their own set of competencies and skills, which should be essential to performing well in that job capacity.

Establishing this profile for a job role allows you to systematically and accurately compare evaluation results in a gap analysis report.

You can create a job role any time after you’ve created at least one job family. Job roles are always used within job families. You can create multiple job roles for a single job family.

To ensure that SAP SuccessFactors identifies to which competencies or skills Job Roles are accountable, Job Codes are assigned to each Job Role. Additionally, each employee is assigned a job code to map the competencies for their role to the job code.

For example, Joe Smith is an Engineering Manager whose job code is EMGR1.

When a form with a job-specific competencies section is created for Joe Smith, the attributes associated with the job role with the job code EMGR1 will be shown on his form.

The Job Code (JOBCODE) links each user to the corresponding Job Role in the UDF (User Data File).