Job categories

The EQUAL WORK GROUP field on an employee record is a flat free-text/number field with no structure — it cannot express a real hierarchy like “Engineer → Trainee/Level 1/Level 2/Senior”. On the Salary Mapping → Job evaluation page, on the Job categories tab, you can build a real tree: top levels and an unlimited number of sub-levels, with support for creating, renaming, moving (changing the parent level) and deleting.

How to create job categories. Everything is edited directly in the tree — no pop-up windows:

Create a job family, e.g. Engineer or Finance — the Add top-level button opens a row at the bottom with the fields Name and Level (optional).
Add levels under it, e.g. Trainee, Level 1, Level 2, Senior — the plus icon (Add sub-level) on the family’s row opens an indented row beneath it.
Enter level numbers if Group Insights should rank by level.
Link employees via the JOB CATEGORY column in the staff list or the import.

Enter saves and Esc cancels. The pencil icon renames in place, the stairs icon sets the level, the scales icon records criteria and the move icon changes the parent level — all open in place in the tree. While the tree is empty you can instead start from a ready-made template in one click: Engineer (Trainee → Senior), Administration (Assistant → Specialist) or Production (Operator 1–3). The template creates the job family and its levels with level numbers; then rename or delete whatever you don’t need. The longer explanation of levels is under More about levels on the tab.

Each level can also carry the same job-evaluation criteria Equal-work group criteria already has (Skill, Effort, Responsibility, Working conditions, 1-5 scale, plus any extra dimension your organisation has added under the Evaluation factors tab) — the same legal grounding is reused rather than rebuilt.

This is additive, not a replacement. The job category tree lives entirely independently of EQUAL WORK GROUP; there is no automatic link or migration between the two. You choose which employees to move over — either one at a time via the Job category field on the employee’s profile (the Job categories feature must be turned on for the field to appear), or many at once by adding a “Job category” column to your CSV/Excel import file (Settings → Import employees) with the path as text, e.g. “Engineer/Senior” — matched against your existing tree, never creating a new level. A path that isn’t found is flagged as a warning in the preview (the import isn’t blocked), but clears that employee’s job category assignment on commit — the same convention the Legal entity column already uses. A blank cell in the column, by contrast, leaves any existing assignment completely untouched.

When an employee has both a job category and an EQUAL WORK GROUP value, the job category wins for grouping in the Classification table, Group Insights and the Overview’s key figures (number of equal-work groups and female-dominated groups) — the group filter on the Overview and in Group Insights also lists the job categories, so you can filter on them. Criteria recorded on a job-category level are shown in Group Insights just like equal-work group criteria. The flat field is only used for employees who haven’t been moved over yet, so grouping keeps working correctly through the whole transition without needing to switch everyone at once. The same grouping applies in Individual Analysis (including its group filter), the EU Pay Transparency report, the annual snapshot and the answers to employees’ pay-transparency requests.

Level (ranking in Group Insights). Each job category can have an optional Level — a positive whole number (1, 2, 3 …) where a higher level means higher job requirements. Set it when creating the category or later via the stairs icon on its row (edited in place); leave the field empty to remove it. Group Insights uses the level to rank job categories in the cross-group comparison (a female-dominated role is compared against higher-paid roles in lower-ranked groups). The level is compared on the same scale as numbered equal-work groups: level 3 against group “2” compares as 3 vs 2. A category with no level is left out of the cross-group comparison. Under Settings → Salary Mapping – settings (System parameters) an Admin can instead choose Job category ranking: Criteria points, which ranks categories by the weighted score (1–5 scale) of their recorded criteria instead of the level — see Group Insights for details.

A level cannot be deleted while it still has sub-levels or employees assigned to it — move or delete those first. The feature is off by default and is enabled per organization.