The Role of the Job Architecture Owner: A Governance Guide
Michelle Dervan
30 Jun 2026
• 4 minute read
In this guide
What a Job Architecture Owner is and why the role matters.
Why governance is essential under the EU Pay Transparency Directive.
The six governance decisions every organisation should define.
How to keep your job architecture accurate, compliant and up to date.
You've invested time building a job architecture to support compliance with the EU Pay Transparency Directive. While the initial build may be finished, the reality is that it's a living artefact and it needs to keep pace with your business as new roles emerge and existing ones evolve. Without a simple governance process, decisions get made informally, the architecture drifts, and you gradually lose the ability to explain why jobs are grouped the way they are.
Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive, you need to be able to show that employees doing work of equal value are grouped objectively. If your architecture has drifted, you may not be able to do that.
The fix is straightforward: one named person accountable for changes to the architecture, and a clear process for how decisions get made. This is the role of the Job Architecture Owner.
This is a governance guide for that person. It covers the six decisions needed to set the role up for success.
Decision 1: Who is the Job Architecture Owner?
The Job Architecture Owner is the single named person accountable for the integrity of your job architecture. They are typically a senior HR or Reward professional. Their responsibilities are:
Evaluating proposed changes using your job evaluation methodology
Deciding whether a change is localised (they can approve directly) or large-scale (requires escalation)
Ensuring decisions are documented, including rejections
Convening an annual review and escalating any trends in exceptions
Handling any challenges from job holders to how their job has been evaluated
Ensuring that job architecture feeds into recruitment and pay decisions
Without a single accountable person, job evaluations will get made informally, drift may accumulate, and your job architecture loses the explainability that the Directive requires.
In addition to the Job Architecture Owner, you will also need an escalation point, usually the Chief People Officer, and a small job evaluation working group when there are large-scale decisions required.
You should also have a simple appeals process in place so that job holders can raise concerns about how their job has been evaluated. The Owner is the right person to handle these.
Decision 2: When should your Job Architecture Owner make a governance decision?
The key rule here is that governance decisions relate to jobs in your job architecture and not to the people doing those jobs. If someone is being hired or promoted into an existing job that hasn't changed its requirements, then no governance decision is needed.
Governance is triggered when an entirely new job is being created, or when an existing job's scope has shifted enough that it no longer fits its current evaluation.
Decision 3: How will you handle different types of changes?
You will encounter two main types of changes.
Localised decisions
Creating a new job within the existing framework or reviewing the scores of an existing job due to scope change. The Architecture Owner handles these directly, approving the outcome or escalating to the CPO where needed.
Large-scale decisions
Examples of large-scale decisions include:
Adding or removing a job family
Adding or removing a grade or level
Granting framework exceptions
Integrating a large set of new jobs after an acquisition
These need escalation to the Chief People Officer and potentially to the working group.
If you're not sure which category a decision falls into, ask: does this change the framework itself and/or impact a substantial portion of the jobs in it, or does the change involve adding incremental content to it? If it's the former, treat it as a large-scale decision.
Decision 4: How will you document your decisions?
Every request should be recorded: what was requested, the rationale, who decided, and the outcome, including rejections. If you use software to manage your job architecture, the change log should be captured automatically and reasoning can be recorded alongside it.
Documenting every decision matters for two reasons. First, when someone asks in two years why two jobs sit at different levels. Second, when a works council or employee asks you to demonstrate that your job groupings are objective. A clear record of decisions made using a consistent methodology is the strongest defence.
Decision 5: How will you handle exceptions?
You may occasionally need to make exceptions. Each one should be documented with explicit reasoning for why this case warranted different treatment. Watch for patterns too. If you're granting several similar exceptions within a year, it may be a signal that the structure is not meeting the needs of the business and may need to change.
Exceptions are worth scrutinising carefully in the context of job evaluation. If an exception feels right but you can't articulate why using the evaluation criteria, that's a reason to pause. All job evaluation scoring decisions should be well supported by documented evidence in the job profile and not based on assumptions about the job.
Decision 6: How will you run your annual review?
It is recommended to carry out an annual review to check your job evaluation system against the reality of the business. A full re-evaluation is only needed if jobs have changed significantly so the purpose of the annual review is to catch the things that may slip through day-to-day: structural gaps that have opened up as the business has grown, drift in evaluations of specific jobs, recurring friction points surfaced by managers during the year.
Read more about quality checking your job architecture for EU Pay Transparency.
Keep it simple
Day-to-day, most of what the Job Architecture Owner does is straightforward: a hiring manager flags a new job, the Owner evaluates it, records the outcome, and moves on. When governance is working, the job architecture stays current, decisions are made quickly and consistently, and you have a clear record of why things are the way they are.
The goal is to make sure that when the EU Pay Transparency Directive obligations require you to stand behind your job categorisation, you can do so confidently.
