Job architecture and pay: where do the amounts in a salary grade come from?

Search for "job architecture salary" and you usually want one thing: which amount belongs to grade 7? Fair question, uncomfortable answer. A job architecture does not start with the amount. It starts with the order.

That sounds like a dodge, but it is exactly where it goes wrong for companies that do it the other way around. They put amounts on roles first, discover later that two roles of equal weight sit a thousand euros apart, and then have no story to tell. This article walks the two steps in the order they belong, and shows where the amounts come from once you get there.

Step 1: the order, not the amount

A job architecture is a ranking at heart. Which role is heavier than which, and why? The EU Pay Transparency Directive prescribes how you answer that: on four objective, gender-neutral factors.

• Knowledge and skills: education, experience, professional competence.
• Effort: physical, mental, the strain of the work itself.
• Responsibility: what the role decides on, and what breaks when it goes wrong.
• Working conditions: the circumstances the work happens in.

Every role gets a score per factor, and those scores together form the weight of the role. In our case that is a number from 0 to 100, built from four groups of at most 25 points and fourteen underlying subfactors. The exact point total is not the point. The point is that two roles of comparable weight belong in the same grade, even when one is called "Work Planner" and the other "Estimator".

So this step is not about money at all. It is about the question you have to be able to answer when an employee asks why a colleague earns more.

This is what step 1 looks like: separate reasoning per role on each of the four factors.

Step 2: where the amount comes from

Only once the order stands does the amount follow. And here the path splits, depending on your situation.

You are covered by a collective agreement

Then the amounts are already set. The agreement gives you the grades, the steps and the salaries that go with them, and you neither need nor are allowed to change them. The question left for you is a different one: is our classification still right? Is that work planner in grade 7 because the role carries that weight, or because he landed there ten years ago and has picked up tasks ever since?

That is not a theoretical question. From the moment an employee may request the average pay of colleagues doing work of equal value, your classification is the answer you give. A collective agreement supplies the amounts, but not the reasoning for why this role sits in this grade.

You have no collective agreement and no pay table

Then the amounts have to come from somewhere, and this is where many companies fall back on what competitors put in their job ads. That is a weak source: you measure what others ask for, not what the market pays, and you cannot trace it when someone digs.

We search live for recognised sources per role and name them: national pay structure statistics, WageIndicator and the collective agreements that apply in the sector. Out of that comes a market band with a minimum, a median and a maximum. The ladder is then built from the weights and calibrated against that market data: roles of comparable weight land in the same grade, and the grade gets a band that matches what the market pays at that level.

Inside a grade you get steps, so there is room for experience and growth without inventing a new number per employee.

You have your own pay table

Then the same holds as with a collective agreement: the amounts are fixed, and the weight decides which existing grade each role fits best.

And step 2: the ladder, with a band and a median per grade.

The check: where it starts to squeak

Weight leads, the market tests. When those two contradict each other, you want to know before an employee asks. Two signals matter most.

The grade is off the market. If a grade structurally pays below or above what the market does at that level, that is not wrong in itself (you may pay above the market on purpose), but it is something you need a story for. We flag a deviation of more than fifteen percent.

The classification contradicts the weight. A heavier-weighed role sitting in a lower grade than a lighter-weighed one is exactly the pattern the law looks at. Sometimes there is a good reason. Often it is a leftover of how things grew.

Why a grade is not the same as a category

One more distinction that causes confusion in practice. An employee may request the gender-split average pay of colleagues doing equal or equivalent work. That is not your salary grade.

A grade is a pay arrangement; a category of equivalent work is a group of roles of comparable weight. The two often run largely parallel, but not always: a wide grade can hold several categories, and different job titles can fall in the same category. The Dutch explanatory memorandum gives the example of a photojournalist and a readers' editor at a newspaper publisher: different title, different work, valued as equivalent.

Categories follow from the weight, not from the grade. The amber flag warns that a group is small enough for the average to point at one person.

Whoever has classified roles by weight can pull those categories out. Whoever only has grades still has that translation ahead of them.

What to take from this

Short version, in the order that works:

1. Weigh your roles on the four factors and settle the ranking.
2. Set the band per grade: from your collective agreement or pay table, or from market data with the sources named.
3. Check where the classification and the market contradict each other.
4. Record why a role sits where it sits, because that is what you will be showing.

Want to see what that looks like in full, with five roles, the weighing per role and the bands that follow? Look at the worked job architecture example of an installation company, or read how to build a pay structure yourself without getting stuck in a spreadsheet.

Aycabtu supplies the reasoning and the documentation. Whether you actually meet your obligations also depends on what you do with your pay policy and on the rest of the directive. This article is sourced information, not legal advice.