What’s in a Name? Standardized Occupations

A (free) new Visier feature

With the fall 2021 release of Visier, the ability to standardize your job names is available as a no-cost option to all customers. The standardized occupations capability is an important one, as it can have far-reaching benefits. Here is what to expect when you implement standardized occupations in your organization, and where you can learn more.

Why are standardized occupations important?

Job titles can be messy. Different departments often have different job titles for the same role. Regional requirements, organizational changes, acquisitions, and even managerial whim can create a wide range of job names for the same role. These discrepancies introduce complications when it comes to compensation reviews, career pathing, ensuring pay equity, and so much more.

Organizations have typically addressed this by initiating expensive consulting projects in an effort to clean up job names, hierarchies, and improve organizational alignment. These are often one-time engagements that effectively clean house, but the house does not stay clean—requiring another paid consulting engagement, of course. Even implementing a naming convention doesn’t help for long; businesses change too quickly.

This is where the standardized occupations capability from Visier, in partnership with Emsi Burning Glass, comes into play. Visier’s standardized occupations capability leverages AI and the Emsi Burning Glass jobs structure to match an organization’s jobs (using job titles and any other fields that add details to jobs) to a standardized list of job names and hierarchies. Visier automates this process for you, continuously augmenting your source data, building alignment across your organization, and ensuring you can always match your jobs internally and to the external market.

How do standardized occupations impact the way you manage people?

Being able to standardize job names in your organization has significant benefits, including:

• Establishing a single common view of all jobs across their organization to give insight into trends, forecasts, and turnover patterns

• Removing the risk that equitable compensation, promotion, and recognition decisions are hiding behind different job titles

• Improving career conversations and insights around internal mobility

• Refining workforce planning and cost decisions

• Jumpstarting your internal skills tracking by also including the top five expected skills for each job

Each of the above items is reason enough on its own to begin incorporating standardized occupations data, but it’s worth calling out how important the additional skills data can be. As part of the partnership, Visier and Emsi Burning Glass provide you with the top five skills that appear in job postings from the standard job name. This list enriches the employee and requisition records with values for expected skills, as these are the skills that the job market expects applicants to possess. This capability allows you to explore what skills your employees are expected to have based on the skills that employers are advertising for. This gives employees a starting point to build out their own skills profile and information on what they’ll need for career advancement.

Delivering new benchmark insights

There is an additional reason we are so keen for everyone to take us up on the standardized occupations feature. Visier benchmarks are so detailed because we build everything on a common data model. When enough customers use the standard occupation names, we will be able to produce benchmarks for these specific jobs, by location. We know this type of detailed insight elevates the value of the benchmark data. Help us to help you by bringing standardization to all of the jobs in the Visier community data set.

Find out more about standardized occupations

Getting organized is great. Staying organized automatically is even better! And the best part of all is that this service is available at no additional charge. It is automatically available to all Visier customers. When you are ready to learn more, we’ve created additional resources to help you.

• For more insights into the value of standardizing job names, read this informative blog post. 

• Log in to the Visier customer portal and check out this overview. You may also want to review this FAQ document for more information.

• Watch this short video to learn how easy it is to fill out an order form to enable standardized occupations.

We are thrilled to be able to include standardized occupations within Visier People: Organization for free. We know the value this feature will bring to your organization, and we can’t wait to hear your success stories!