In my research questionnaire, I wanted people from all over the Welsh public service to identify their job level.

I looked at organisational stratification literature which mainly came from the private sector and military. They offered weird and wonderful job levels like: individual contributor and intermediate non-managerial. They were uncommon and no help at all to me!

So, I developed my own that I thought would be more relevant to the public service.

My Job Levels Framework started out with four levels but after doing a pilot questionnaire, it expanded to 5: operational, business, management, senior management and strategic.

I’d love this Framework to be helpful beyond my research and I’ve thought of 3 applications:

  1. Establishing common pay levels across organisations, so that we can make further headway on the ‘equal work for equal pay’ and ‘gender pay gap’ agendas.
  2. Who’s seen training advertised for ‘experienced managers’ or ‘budding execs’? All a bit vague…My framework could be used to better publicise training for the right people
  3. With a common functions level framework we’d be better able to move people around in a crisis, not just within organisation but between them too

Let me know if you think of other helpful applications!