Traditional Job Architecture Career Streams Collide with Modern Work

As organizations increasingly embrace pay transparency, a spotlight also is being cast on job architectures. While greater openness in compensation decision-making is a positive step toward fairness and employee satisfaction, this trend also has revealed challenges in terms of communicating traditional job structures and leveling models to the organization.

Traditional job architectures are often inspired by or directly based on frameworks from compensation survey companies, categorizing work into defined “career streams” to distinguish between types of work and common career paths like “support,” “professional” or “management.”

Career-stream-driven leveling nomenclature like P1/P2/P3 is part of the total rewards lexicon. Historically, these clearly defined career tracks were intended for more precise job matching and benchmarking, and this “comp speak” has largely lived behind the scenes without an intent to be broadly shared with the organization.

With increased pressure on pay transparency and workforce expectations for clarity of career growth opportunities, organizations that peel back the curtains and communicate such information to the workforce are realizing traditional structures present some unintended consequences.

It is likely time for a momentum shift away from labeled career streams in job architectures and toward simpler, less segmented approaches with a single leveling ladder focused on the actual scope of work, required skills and organizational impact.

Three Friction Areas … and How to Mitigate Them

While some organizations experience success with strong labeling conventions inherent within career streams, many others see traditional career stream approaches have become increasingly misaligned with modern work realities. A notable amount of friction can — and likely will — occur when communicating labeled career streams, leading to non-value-added complexity and conflict.

This article explores three key friction areas arising from conventional job architectures and offers insights into alternatives that may better support modern organizational needs.

Friction 1: Individual Contributor Career Stream Labeling Is Divisive

Career stream segmentation, particularly within individual contributor tracks, often unintentionally creates a hierarchy of perceived value. Organizations commonly divide these roles into categories like “support” or “para-professional” for task-oriented work and “professional” for roles requiring more solution-oriented skill sets. However, this approach can create a perception that “support” roles are less valuable to the organization, even when some roles share similar scope and complexity with “professional” roles.

For instance, in sales functions, business development representatives (BDRs) are often classified under a “support” stream, while other direct selling roles are “professional.” This discrepancy can lead to frustration among BDRs, who often are college graduates poised to advance into sales territory roles as their next growth step. Similarly, experienced customer care associates might be labeled “para-professional” and carry responsibilities and expertise similar to those of recent college graduates in the “professional” stream. It’s not uncommon for organizations to spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to explain or justify the distinction without introducing feelings of inequity and hindering morale.

It begins to beg the question of whether the “juice is worth the squeeze” in drawing these types of distinctions when they really aren’t adding any value.

Friction 2: Having Direct Reports Is No Longer a Leadership Prerequisite

As organizations adopt flatter, matrixed structures and ways of working, leadership is evolving beyond the traditional necessity of direct reports. Traditional job architectures often equate managerial roles with supervising others, but this overlooks other significant ways organizations expect employees to demonstrate leadership. One of the most common areas where employers struggle is with how many direct reports constitute a “manager”; this is a discussion that quickly becomes counterproductive.

This prescriptive approach to defining leadership roles also raises questions when team structures or sizes change:

Does a role need to be releveled?
Is it a demotion or promotion based on fewer or more direct reports?

Instead of focusing on the number of workers an individual oversees, consider how the role adds value to the organization — in terms of the level of ownership and impact. Modern organizations increasingly recognize leadership manifests in various forms — project leadership, mentorship and strategic influence — which all contribute to individual and corporate success.

Friction 3: The Scope and Complexity of “Peer” Levels in Adjacent Streams Tend to Be More Similar than Different

Organizations frequently experience challenges when communicating the differences between overlapping levels across career streams. For example, a P3 software engineer and an M2 product manager might sit as peer levels in the job architecture but are in different labeled career streams. This raises questions such as: If someone moves from a P3 role to an M2 role, is that considered a promotion or a lateral move? Unless a role truly advances to a higher level, it becomes difficult to clearly define and consistently apply what constitutes a promotion.

Attempting to draw distinctions when roles share comparable scope and complexity can confuse employees trying to understand how their role and contributions compare to others, and make it difficult for leaders to justify and explain the differences to their teams.

The Push Toward More Career-Stream-Agnostic Architectures

In today’s complex work environment, job architectures should add clarity, not confusion. Given these consistent areas of friction that occur within organizations, it is likely time for a momentum shift away from labeled career streams in job architectures and toward simpler, less segmented approaches with a single leveling ladder focused on the actual scope of work, required skills and organizational impact.

With less emphasis placed on the nuances of what separates types of individual contributor work or whether mid-career roles have direct reports or not, organizations can create a clearer and more adaptable framework that resonates with employees and supports diverse career journeys.

A more agnostic job architecture likely makes it easier to be transparent about career progression and better supports internal mobility without the interference of divisive stream labels distracting from the message.

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