The HR Career Architecture (HRCA) provides a consistent, structured framework for job levels and career streams, helping employees to navigate their careers while equipping the university with tools to attract and develop talent.
- Provides managers and employees a framework for meaningful conversations about career growth, skill development, and future opportunities.
- Strengthens and improves overall HR processes and helps streamline job evaluations—making everything faster and more consistent.
HRCA is not:
- Not a compensation initiative – it’s about defining career pathways and job structures.
- Not about adjusting salaries.
- Employees should Not expect pay changes just because of HRCA.
- Any compensation adjustments must be based on current policy, guidelines, programs, and funding – Not HRCA.
NOTE: HR Career Architecture is an ongoing initiative being implemented across campus. If you have questions about its impact on your position, please reach out to your supervisor and be aware that different units are in different stages of implementation.
Resources
Guidelines
Job Profiles
Job Catalog
Forms – Job Profiles (pending updates)
Employee
Q: What will HRCA change for me as an employee?
A: The impact will vary from employee to employee based on their individual circumstances and a collaborative review of their position including both IHR and their unit. Current HR employees may experience a title change and an updated job description. Some employees will have no change because their position has already been aligned with HRCA guidelines.
Q: Will this affect my pay?
A: No, HRCA is not a compensation initiative. It neither reduces nor increases the salary that the university already determined appropriate for each position. By improving consistency and comparability across units, HRCA will improve and inform our compensation decisions going forward.
Q: Why is this limited to HR?
A: HR Career Architecture was identified as a part of a set of changes to how HR works at Illinois within the Operational Excellence initiative. In the future, similar structure and guidelines will be developed for other functional areas.
Q: I appreciate the additional vacation time I have as civil service (CS), and want to know if I can stay CS for the vacation benefit or if I won't have a choice in the event my position is classified as AP? Or will IHR be modifying the vacation benefits to be the same?
A: IHR has pursued many changes to align overtime-exempt CS and AP employment practices since 2018. An overall change to vacation accrual is not part of the HR Career Architecture, and employees will continue to be subject to their employee group’s policies, including if they are reclassified.
Q: Do employees aligning with HRCA remain HR Associates and still have working titles of HR Generalist, Sr. HR Generalist, HR Business Partner? Or will the title and working title be the same?
A: The job profile titles will be the working title (i.e., the Job Detail Title in HRFE/Banner). The classification title, such as HR Associate, would be associated with the position but not appear on the job.
Supervisor
Q: If there is a substantial change in duties (higher level) but still within the job profile and range for that title, will a unit be able to make a salary increase in the current title without a promotion?
A: Yes.
Q: How can we address staff expectations around the topic of promotions as part of professional development and competitive retention?
A: By defining clearer criteria for each level, HRCA is a crucial first step toward a transparent and consistent title & pay structure for our staff. Having a clear definition of what a higher-level position looks like provides employees and supervisors alike with a tool to set expectations and goals that they can measure progress against.
When it comes to competitive retention, HRCA reduces the need for ad hoc or inconsistent job titles, making it easier to recognize and reward growth within a current role. The guidelines affirm that development doesn’t always require a title change—progress and increased responsibility can be acknowledged through appropriate adjustments in compensation. This approach is already the standard among our peer institutions and will help us better support and retain our talented staff.
HR Professional
Q: Can units add titles or modifiers to HR positions beyond the titles that have Job Profiles?
A: No. If a new Specialist track Job Profile is needed, IHR CCCA would review that need before setting up the profile.
Q: When a unit has a vacancy and the position could be either of two classifications, can the unit advertise as either classification in the posting to get the most applicants?
A: Not at this time. When the HRCA project team and IHR Matrix teams met, this question came up, and the mechanics of trying to accomplish this would create significant problems in managing two different registers with different scoring and referral processes.
Q: As a unit, we’re excited at the prospect that the HR Officer classification would allow us to hire a recent college graduate into a HR Generalist role! We could actually hire folks with a Master’s degree in HR and no experience into a HR Generalist role!
A: These are true, but we do want to temper expectations that the credential assessment and referral process still apply. There is no guarantee that new graduates will be at the top of the register and eligible for referral from a given applicant pool.
Q: As employees are promoted from one level to the next and more than one classification can be used, will units get to select a new classification for the employee to be able to have a probationary period for the new role? Currently with everyone lumped into HR Associate, there is one probationary period when first employed in the classification, but no additional probationary periods for advanced roles within the classification.
A: Whether an employee serves a probationary period and the length of the probation are determined by SUCSS rules and are not at the university’s discretion. We expect most positions to be HR Associates and employees who start in HR Officer to eventually move into the HR Associate, and any employee will only serve one probation in the classification. The first time an employee enters a civil service classification, they will serve a probationary period, so it is true that some promotional paths will cause more probationary periods depending on how a given employee’s hire & subsequent career develops.
Q: The HR functions listed included employee learning & professional development and workplace diversity & inclusion. The current Training & Development Specialist I and II classifications are not mentioned. Will folks in those classifications be transitioned to the HR Associate or other classifications listed in the HR Career Architecture?
A: This was a borderline call: The HRCA project team determined that the Training & Development Specialist series is out-of-scope at this time, so employees in that series & others (e.g., Program Coordinators) who administer training with employees as their target audience are not affected at this time and will remain in their current classification. Those areas of duties are included to reflect that many HR professionals hold those roles as a fraction of their overall duties.
Q: I was surprised to see that the Associate Director and Director level are now Academic Professional and not Civil Service. Is it true that only the Executive Director level could be AP? What happens to employees who were previously reclassified to CS from AP?
A: To clarify, the specific status of the Executive Director title comes from the SUCSS Exemption Procedure Manual. Other Director and modified-Director titles have continued to be exempted on a case-by-case basis where IHR determined the exemption was justifiable based on evolving feedback from SUCSS since the exemption criteria changes effective 10/01/2018 (i.e., what led to our university’s Professional Employment Redesign). This has led to more Director and modified-Director positions being classified as civil service.
The consistency we are introducing through HRCA will support a clearer boundary of which positions and titles are CS or AP. Our implementation plan includes a review of individual HR positions to determine their level under the new criteria and what action needs to be taken to complete that alignment for each employee. We can’t pre-judge that process, but it is possible for an employee to be reclassified from either employee group to the other based on that determination.
Q: Are the Specialist and Specialist Leadership tracks intended primarily for central campus HR, possibly with some exceptions for use in units and colleges? And are the Generalist and Leadership tracks primarily for use in units/colleges?
A: The HRCA project team does expect the vast majority of positions in units to be in the Generalist and Leadership tracks. All four HRCA tracks (Generalist, Leadership, Specialist, and Specialist Leadership) are available to campus and units, but certain job profiles for Specialist titles are limited to campus offices where the role can only be exercised at the campus level. For example, unit-level positions do not administer the campus Salary Plan as Compensation Specialists do, represent the university in formal discipline and grievances as Labor & Employee Relations Consultants do, or conduct EEO investigations as OAE’s EEO Associates do.
Q: Some specific functions like LER are not specified in the Director, Executive Director, and Assistant Dean job profiles. Why aren’t they listed? Shouldn’t they be there to reflect special cases and high-sensitivity matters?
A: As the job profiles reach higher levels, fewer areas are itemized because the position’s responsibility is for the overall strategy and operations of their unit. So those levels reference “overall human resources strategy and operational activities” instead of repeating that statement for talent acquisition, LER, payroll, leave management, compensation, etc. This doesn’t preclude that individual situations are escalated to those leaders for decisions and resolution as part of their overall responsibility, only that each area is not spelled out.
Q: Does HRCA have implications for whether there is a ceiling to certain roles and units, meaning that the position tops out and there is not infinite room to grow/promote?
A: Yes, by setting a consistent definition and controlling the proliferation of title variations/modifiers, HRCA reflects that there isn’t always another level, and the focus should be on the work that the university needs from that position.
General HRCA
Q: What is the comparability between sub-families? Is there any sort of crosswalk?
A: Broadly, the Specialist positions follow a Specialist, Senior Specialist, Consultant progression that parallels the Generalist, Senior Generalist, Business Partner progression of the Generalist track. Both tracks have an HR Representative level for overtime non-exempt positions.