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Competencies and skills only create real value when they’re anchored in a clear job architecture: a shared view of roles, levels, and career paths. That’s why gradar treats job architecture, job evaluation, competencies, and skills as one connected system - so talent decisions stay consistent, fair, and scalable.
Job architecture defines your role landscape: job families, levels, and role profiles. Once that structure is in place, competencies and skills can be applied consistently across the organisation.
What changes when competencies and skills are anchored to roles:
Role clarity: competencies and skills become part of a role profile - not a vague wish list.
Comparable roles + flexible mobility: job evaluation and job architecture establish work of equal value and level logic across functions. Skills then add a different advantage: they make capabilities more transferable, enabling mobility across job families (even when domain knowledge still needs to be built).
Progression based on role requirements: career paths become tangible because each role profile clarifies expected outcomes, scope, and the competencies/skills needed. Levels provide structure - but development guidance comes from the specific role requirements.
The stack in one sentence:
Job evaluation defines internal work value → job architecture turns it into a usable structure → competencies and skills describe what “good” looks like within each role and level.
Many organisations use the terms interchangeably. Separating them helps you design cleaner HR processes:
Competencies describe how work is done (observable behaviours, professional capabilities, leadership behaviours).
Skills describe what someone can do (specific, often teachable capabilities - technical, digital, functional, or domain skills).
In practice, most companies use a combination of input (skills/knowledge), process (behaviours), and output (results) perspectives when applying competency concepts in HR systems.
The key is: both only become scalable when they are mapped to roles and levels in the job architecture.
When job architecture, job evaluation, competencies, and skills are aligned, talent management becomes much more objective and actionable:
Workforce planning: identify capability gaps by job family/level, not just by team anecdotes.
Development & learning: target learning to the skills and competencies required for the next role/level.
Succession & high potentials: avoid confusing “high performer” with “high potential” by defining future-role requirements clearly and assessing against them.
Mobility & career paths: enable transparent moves across functions by using shared level definitions and comparable role profiles.
Performance and contribution: support more consistent performance conversations by clarifying expectations (role outcomes + required behaviours/skills).
Compensation & cost simulation: use job evaluation and job architecture (grades/bands) to build consistent internal pay structures and link them to market benchmarks - so you can model workforce cost impacts (e.g. growth scenarios, reorganisations, hot-skill premiums) and make strategic personnel plans based on both capability needs and budget realities.
In other words: job architecture provides the structure, job evaluation provides the internal value logic, and competencies/skills provide the capability language - together forming the backbone for modern talent management.
We work with a set of strategic partners to connect job architecture with competency and skill ecosystems:
How gradar connects job evaluation with TMA competencies:
In gradar, competency management is anchored in the same foundation as job architecture and job evaluation. As part of the job grading process, gradar translates job evaluation results into a role-specific competency profile using TMA’s global competency library - typically matching up to seven competencies based on career path, job grade, and global job family.
This creates a consistent link between the internal work-value logic (job evaluation), the role context (family/level/career path), and the behavioural expectations captured in competency profiles. The result is a practical framework for talent processes such as development, career progression, and succession planning—supported by filtering and exportable competency reports (including editable Word documents) and options to customise or fully replace the underlying competency model when needed.
How Learned.io uses gradar's job architecture and job profiles:
Learned.io can draw directly on gradar's job architecture, including job families, levels, competencies, and role-specific requirements, to make its talent processes more consistent and meaningful. Rather than relying on generic skill lists, Learned.io can anchor development journeys, learning recommendations, and career conversations to what each role actually requires. The result is a tighter connection between job structure and day-to-day people decisions, giving managers and employees a shared, structured reference point for growth and progression.
How Cobrainer and gradar work together:
Cobrainer can draw on gradar's job architecture, including job families, levels, and role-specific requirements, to add a dynamic skills intelligence layer on top of a stable, structured role foundation. With gradar's architecture as the reference point, Cobrainer can match skills data more precisely to comparable roles and levels, improve internal mobility and talent search, and support targeted upskilling, rather than working from definitions that vary from team to team.
The relationship can also run in the opposite direction. If an organisation already uses Cobrainer's role taxonomy or job architecture as its starting point, gradar can use that structure as the basis for job evaluation, assessing roles for internal work value, calibrating levels, and establishing a consistent, defensible pay structure on top of the existing framework.
How SAP SuccessFactors connects job classifications, job profiles, and skills:
In SAP SuccessFactors, organisations often separate a structural layer from a profile and skills layer:
Job classifications (often job families, job codes, and job grades/levels) provide a consistent structural framework to support position management and compensation management, and to enable comparability across roles.
Job profiles describe the role-specific requirements in practice. This is operationalised through Job Profile Builder, where organisations create and maintain job profiles (role purpose, responsibilities, and linked competencies and skills) and connect them back to the underlying job classification/grade structure.
Many organisations then add a more dynamic skills layer (e.g., via Talent Intelligence Hub) to use skills consistently across learning, internal mobility, and talent search - while keeping skills anchored to job profiles and job classifications.
With gradar, you can use job architecture as the consistent reference point to:
define role profiles by family and level,
connect competencies and skills to those profiles,
and use the same structure as the basis for talent processes (development, mobility, succession) without losing the link to job evaluation and internal equity.
Competencies and skills create the most value when they’re anchored to a shared role structure. Job architecture defines job families, levels, and role profiles - so competencies and skills can be applied consistently across teams, locations, and functions.
Job evaluation establishes internal work value (e.g., what is comparable and why). Job architecture operationalises that logic into a usable structure of roles and levels that HR processes can rely on day to day.
Competencies describe how work is done - observable behaviours and professional capabilities (including leadership behaviours). Skills describe what someone can do - specific, often teachable capabilities such as technical, digital, functional, or domain skills.
Skills make capabilities more transferable and help identify adjacent moves beyond traditional career ladders. With a clear job architecture, you can match people to roles based on relevant skills while still being transparent about where domain knowledge or experience needs to be built.
No. Levels provide structure, comparability, and orientation across the organisation. Competencies and skills add practical clarity within roles by describing expectations and supporting development and readiness decisions. The determination of work of equal value is also a key requirements of EU Pay Transparency directive.
Keep competencies role-based and outcome-linked. A good role profile makes expectations observable and relevant, focusing on what truly differentiates effective performance in that role - rather than listing everything that sounds desirable.
Aligned role profiles and requirements allow you to identify capability gaps by job family and level instead of relying on team-by-team anecdotes. That makes planning more consistent and helps prioritise hiring, development, or redesign decisions.
It enables targeted development by linking learning to the competencies and skills required for a specific next role (or a set of adjacent roles). This makes learning pathways clearer and improves the connection between development effort and business needs.
Clear future-role requirements reduce ambiguity and bias in assessments. You can evaluate readiness against defined role expectations and better distinguish “high performer” from “high potential.”
Job evaluation and job architecture support consistent grades/bands and internal equity. This structure can then be linked to pay bands and market benchmarks and used for cost simulation - while competencies and skills provide additional context for development and capability planning.
Yes - when they’re anchored to role profiles. Performance conversations become more consistent when expectations combine role outcomes (what needs to be achieved) with behaviours and skills (how work is done).
Many HR suites separate a structural layer (job families/grades/levels) from job profiles and a skills layer. A strong job architecture helps keep skills and competencies anchored to roles and levels, so they remain comparable and usable across talent processes.
Not necessarily. Many organisations use a small set of enterprise-wide competencies plus role-family-specific competencies and skills - mapped to consistent levels and role profiles for comparability.
There are two proven ways to begin - choose the one that best fits your current maturity and data quality.
Explorative grading first: evaluate the jobs you already have, cluster them into job families/levels based on work value, and then derive job profiles with content, competencies, and skills from the results.
Job architecture first: define job families, levels, and draft role profiles upfront, then validate and calibrate the structure by determining work of equal value through job evaluation.
In both cases, the key is to start with a priority scope (e.g., a few job families) and use the outcome in one or two processes (such as L&D or internal mobility) to test and refine.
You can, but treat it as a starting point - not the end state. Skills frameworks scale best when they’re anchored to role profiles and levels (and aligned with work-value logic), otherwise definitions and governance tend to fragment across teams.
gradar helps you build and maintain job architecture and job profiles, keep the link to job evaluation and internal equity, and use the same structure as a consistent reference point for competencies, skills, and talent processes.
Job titles, job families, career paths & competency profiles - the building blocks of a clear job architecture
Define grades, career paths & job families for a fair, transparent organization.
