By the APS Centre of Excellence for Workforce Planning
It is HR month and we are excited to be celebrating by announcing the release of the updated ‘APS Job Family Framework’ is coming soon.
The APS Centre of Excellence for Workforce Planning has concluded a strategic review of its signature framework – the APS Job Family Framework. A strategic review of the Framework is undertaken every 3-5 years, and this year aligns with the recent release of the Occupation Standard Classification for Australia (OSCA) formerly known as ANZSCO (Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations).
What is the Job Family Framework?
The Job Family Framework (the Framework) is a workforce segmentation tool that outlines occupational groupings by task similarity. It lays the foundation for workforce planning and development of workforce management initiatives. Segmenting your agency’s workforce with the Framework enables you to:
- understand your agency’s workforce profile
- understand the type of work undertaken by your agency
- benchmark against the labour market and broader Australian economy (through its linkage to OSCA)
- identify critical job roles
- identify key workforce risks and challenges
- address and anticipate future workforce demand and supply challenges.
There are 3 tiers in the Framework – job family, job function and job role. The Framework provides flexibility for agencies to develop job profiles at the fourth tier.
What has changed?
The strategic review identified opportunities to calibrate and streamline the Framework to align with OSCA, and ensure consistency, statistical balance and feasibility. Some of the key changes to the framework include:
- renaming Administration job family to Business and Organisational Management
- discontinuing the Senior Executive job family as roles have been moved into relevant job families
- discontinuing the Monitoring and Audit job family as roles have been moved to Compliance and Regulation
- splitting the Science and Health job family into two job families - ‘Science’ and ‘Health’
- moving Cyber roles from Intelligence job family to ICT and Digital job family
- consolidating Information and Knowledge Management and Intelligence into one job family
- renaming job functions for clear categorisation and groupings
- discontinuing job roles that can be aggregated to ensure statistical feasibility
- adding new roles requested by agencies.
Over the past six months, the team has analysed the utilisation and reporting of the roles in the current framework and conducted extensive consultations with various agencies and stakeholder groups to test and refine proposed updates. The team has also collaborated with a working group of subject matter experts from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Jobs and Skills Australia, APS Professions and the Australian Public Service Commission, to verify the highlighted outcomes of the review.
A change log documenting all changes including suggested remapping will be made available with the updated Framework.
What is next?
Stay tuned! The Centre of Excellence will be launching the Framework in the coming months with a suite of resources and masterclasses to support agencies. These resources will also cover when the changes will come into effect and any implications for agencies that report their job family data. Register your interest for the upcoming masterclass. If you have any queries, please contact our team.