Quick Start

Before You Start

Building a job and skill architecture is a structural project. It touches every role, every team, and eventually every talent process in the organization. The goal is not perfection on day one — it is a clean, version-controlled foundation that improves continuously.

What you need before starting:

• Executive sponsor — typically the CHRO or VP People. Architecture decisions affect compensation, career paths, and organizational design. Sponsorship at C-level removes blockers.
• Current job data — export your existing job titles, descriptions, levels, and org structure from your HRIS. Messy data is expected. The process cleans it.
• Scope decision — start with one business unit or function (e.g., Technology, or a single country) and expand. Full-enterprise rollouts in one pass rarely succeed.

Five Steps to a Live Architecture

Step 1: Ingest Existing Data

Upload your current job catalog into Cobrainer. The platform ingests job titles, descriptions, organizational units, and existing level/grade information. Common formats: HRIS exports (CSV/Excel), SAP SuccessFactors job catalog exports, or Workday position management data.

The AI analyzes naming patterns, identifies duplicates and near-duplicates, and flags inconsistencies. Most organizations discover 30–60% redundancy in their job title landscape at this stage.

Step 2: Generate Job Families and Clusters

Cobrainer groups roles into job families and clusters automatically. The algorithm uses the patented Skills Graph to identify functional similarity — not just title matching, but actual skill and task overlap.

Review the generated families. Merge or split where organizational context requires it. This step typically takes 2–3 working sessions with HR leadership.

Step 3: Define Levels and Build Role Profiles

For each job family, define the level structure. Best practices by organization size:

For each role × level combination, Cobrainer generates a complete profile: general description, detailed tasks, required skills with proficiency levels, qualifications, equal pay criteria, and risk categories.

Step 4: Attach Skills and Proficiency Levels

The Skills Graph maps relevant skills to each role automatically. Each skill receives a proficiency level (1–5 scale: Basic, Qualified, Advanced, Professional, Domain Expert). Review and adjust — domain experts know which skills matter most for their function.

This step creates the bridge between your job architecture and every downstream skills-based process: recruiting templates, performance criteria, learning recommendations, and career pathing.

Step 5: Integrate and Go Live

Push the architecture into your HRIS. Cobrainer integrates natively with SAP SuccessFactors (certified BTP partner), Workday, and ServiceNow. For other systems, export structured data via API or flat file.

Go-live means: every role in your system maps to a family, cluster, role code, and level. Every role has attached skills, tasks, and evaluation criteria. Every change is version-controlled with full diff history.

What Comes Next

A live architecture is the starting point, not the finish line:

• Continuous versioning — roles evolve. Cobrainer tracks every change with full diff history and rollback capability.
• Pay transparency compliance — map your grading framework to the architecture for gender-neutral job evaluation. See the EU Pay Transparency Directive article.
• AI transformation — assess tasks for AI-automatability and redesign workflows. See the AI Impact on Jobs article.
• Skills-based talent processes — use the architecture to power recruiting templates, performance reviews, and career guidance. See the Skills-Based Talent Processes section.

Timeline: most organizations go from raw data to a live, integrated architecture in 4–6 weeks with Cobrainer.