Job regrading and job families | Cumberland Intranet

Job allocation and job families

The council uses a 'job families' approach. This involves allocating similar jobs into logical categories, or 'families'. For example, under the job families approach all admin posts would be grouped together; similarly all posts where the main focus of the role is customer service, and so on. This grouping of posts into families allows for a fair and consistent approach to job profiles right across the council.

The council's job families framework has the following six families:

Business Support - delivery of administration and business services to support the council.
Organisational Support - delivery of professional services to support the council and partners in longer term, corporate compliance, planning, performance, policy and strategy.
Customer Engagement - provision of assistance, instruction and information to groups and individuals using council facilities.
Operations - delivery of ongoing service activities requiring specialist and vocational expertise.
Regulation and Technical - provision of services of a technical or specialist operational nature to internal and external customers and / or monitoring and enforcement of prescribed regulatory areas.
People Care and Development - support and development of individual or groups of people to build their personal capability in skills, knowledge and / or to assure their protection, security and development.

A job family is a group of jobs with common features. Each job family contains a number of levels, each reflecting different job outputs such as skills, knowledge, and experience.

All council jobs covered by the NJC terms and conditions are allocated to a level within a job family following a job allocation process. The process examines the roles and responsibilities of a job, as well as its Job Working Circumstances.

Job family allocation toolkit (PDF 0.4MB) - the scoring tool

To view the allocation list (which includes all existing roles and their allocations), post specifications and generic role profiles, please visit the Job Families Sharepoint.

How to request regrading of your post

An employee (or group of employees in the same post group) can request a review of the Job Family Allocation / Grade of their post where they consider that the following circumstances apply:

there has been a substantial permanent change to the duties and responsibilities of the post since it was last allocated and graded
there is an identified equivalent (or ‘comparator’) post that has a different allocation to the employee’s post

Regrading Procedure (DOC 176KB)

Regrading Employee Guide (PDF 485KB)

People Management Ticket Portal

Complete the regrading request form (DOC 175KB)

Career grade scheme

The career grade scheme is available to managers to support the recruitment and retention of appropriately skilled staff where jobs are hard to fill or to enable the transition for apprentices or a person engaged through an agency or consultancy (Externally Provided Workforce) into employment with the council.

There are key principles detailed in the scheme which must be followed and the employee is expected to commit to working for the council for a minimum of three years after successfully achieving the required standards in the full role.

Job working circumstances

Job Working Circumstances (JWC) are taken into consideration when scoring a job and consequently determining a salary. JWC's are awarded on temporary basis and relate to the physical and emotional demands of the job as well as the working conditions such as weather, hazards and adverse people behaviour.

Teaching assistants

A working group, which includes Teaching Assistants, representatives from Trade Unions, Head-teachers and council members and officers, was formed to address a number of issues relating to Teaching Assistants. Issues included namely regarding the currency of the job profiles, deployment to specified work, multiplicity of grades and matters relating to career progression.

Outcomes agreed by the working group: