What is a job family, and how is it different from a career ladder?

A job family groups roles that share a type of work; a career ladder describes progression within a level of seniority through a family. One is horizontal grouping, the other vertical progression.

Job family. A cluster of roles requiring similar knowledge and skills, regardless of level — for example an engineering family containing junior through to principal roles, or a finance family spanning transactional to strategic positions.

What it is used for: organising pay structures consistently; comparing roles across the organisation; defining development paths; and benchmarking against external market data, which is collected by family and level.

Sub-families divide large families into specialisms — within engineering, perhaps software, infrastructure and data.

Career ladder (or career path). The sequence of levels within a family, with defined expectations at each, and criteria for moving between them. A ladder answers "what does the next level require of me?".

Career lattice is the more useful modern framing: progression that includes lateral moves between families, not only upward steps. Lateral moves build breadth, which is increasingly what senior roles require — and a purely vertical model treats a sideways move as a failure to progress, which discourages exactly the experience that would make someone effective later.

Levelling is the connecting concept — a common scale applied across all families so that a given level means comparable scope, complexity and impact wherever it sits, which is what makes pay equitable across different kinds of work.

Why this structure exists:

Pay equity. Without it, pay differences between functions are arbitrary and hard to defend.

Transparency, letting people see routes that are not obvious.

Internal mobility, which is far cheaper than external recruitment and retains knowledge.

Workforce planning across comparable roles.

Where it goes wrong:

Families become silos, with movement between them discouraged in practice.

Level definitions inflate over time, so titles drift upward without scope changing.

The structure describes the organisation that existed when it was written.

Titles are confused with levels, particularly when comparing across organisations where the same title means very different things.