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The GW Career Path Program

The Career Path Program is designed to identify the different types of jobs and career paths we have at the university. The job classification structure is the system for how jobs at the university are related based on the type of work and level of work performed in the job. The structure is a tool for staff to understand how these jobs are grouped together and to explore the many ways to plot out a career path, based on an employee’s specific interests, skills, and qualifications. For the first time, this program makes it easy to find and compare similar job opportunities at the university - whether you are looking at a potential internal promotional opportunity or considering moving to another department. The structure is also linked to external industry compensation information, so that our compensation and job design can remain competitive, year after year.

Through the Career Path Program, staff will be able to:

• Explore what the structure looks like
• Find what jobs exist across the university in the Job Library and how they’re grouped together by the type of work and level of work
• Discover paths to specialize in a field by advancing through a career stream or becoming a manager through the Management career stream
• When you're ready to explore a position at the next level, search current career opportunities

 

Explore Your Career Path

Summer 2017 Updates

Since the launch of the Career Path program, the university has been focused on several key initiatives in support of pay structure transparency, with the goal of making pay structure information easy and management for managers and employees at GW.

For next steps, Human Resource Management and Development is gathering suggestions and data as to what informational elements of the university pay structure should be provided to the community in support the Career Path program at GW.

Pay structure information linked to each job classification is planned to be provided through this website once the project has completed.

To provide any feedback or ideas related to pay structure transparency, please contact [email protected].

 

Overview of the Structure

• 21 job families were created across all of the George Washington University (GW).
• Each job family is grouped by the general type of work performed in the job.
• Each job family is segmented by the specialty or concentration of work - these are called subfamilies.
• Each subfamily has jobs with differing scopes – these are career streams.
• Not all subfamilies are the same. For example, some job subfamilies have only a few job classifications, and some have many. It depends on the breadth of jobs at the university that perform that kind of work in a particular job family.

Major differences between the new and old structure

• Recognition of job specialties through job subfamily, with market pay structures to match
• Objective definitions of the various levels of Executive, Management, Individual Contributor and Service & Support career streams
• Framework to help guide employees on necessary skills for jobs in other job families, career streams and levels at GW

Program Background

Beginning in 2012, work began to create a new job classification framework to replace GW’s previous 24-grade system. The resulting framework provides a simple, streamlined infrastructure that will guide employees through career opportunities based on type and level of work.

What the Program DOES

• Assigns every staff job an updated classification based on the type of work and level of work performed
• Provides transparency so that employees understand where their position falls at the university
• Improves consistency so that similar positions at the university can be easily compared (ex. An applicant searching open opportunities should be able to easily compare positions based on their family, subfamily, stream and level attributes)
• Provides career path tools so that current employees can explore where they can move next based on their interests, knowledge, skills and abilities 
• Institutes standard working titles for all job postings to ensure job titles are appropriate for the type of work and level of work

What the Program will NOT Do

• Change pay
• Change job duties (no promotions or demotions)
• Eliminate jobs
• De-value any job’s importance to the university