Guidance

Global HR Design Position Management Framework (HTML)

Updated 26 November 2025

Introduction to Position Management in the Civil Service

Position management within the UK Civil Service has been developed inline with the Shared Services Strategy for Government (PDF, 1,632KB), underpinned by Cluster design and the implementation of modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) technologies whereby Position Management is a standard approach.

Position management is a strategic process focused on aligning roles and responsibilities with the overarching objectives of the organisation and the capabilities of its workforce. This alignment is crucial for achieving a Civil Service that is lean, efficient, and productive, delivering high-quality advice to the Government and outstanding services to the public.

This framework ensures that civil servants in positions possess the necessary attributes to contribute effectively to the Civil Service’s goals. This is supported by Civil Service Success Profiles, Profession Career Frameworks and the Civil Service Skills Taxonomy, which sets out the skills, knowledge, behaviours and proficiency levels expected of civil servants at all levels, serving as a foundation for defining roles and assessing performance.

The strategic importance of position management lies in its ability to ensure that the right people, with the right skills, are in the right roles at the right time, thereby maximising the effectiveness and efficiency of the Civil Service in meeting the evolving needs of the government and the public.

What is Position Management?

A position within an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system can be represented by a chair, these chairs can be vacant or occupied as civil servants join and leave.

A chair might be vacant as per pre-approved budget agreements. This chair is already be on an ERP system waiting to be filled.

Alternatively, the business may need to create a “chair” for a new position based on business needs, this would require a job requisition process.

The chair remains empty but it has an active job requisition to fill the vacancy. This vacancy is advertised on Civil Service Jobs, or is being sourced through other recruitment routes such as contingent labour processes.

A successful candidate is hired and the position is filled.

Without a position defined into an ERP, we are unable to recruit, promote or fill the position with an employee.

Position Management Benefits

Position Management and the convergence against a common language allows the Civil Service to improve our approach to Organisational Design and Strategic Workforce Planning, whilst improving the data quality of the size and shape of organisations, professions and functions like never before.

Budgeting

Assists in maintaining budgetary control by managing salary expenditures and other position-related costs, contributing to financial sustainability.

Workforce Reporting

Improved data quality of our workforce enabling the allocation of resources effectively, ensuring that the right people are in the right roles, which enhances productivity and efficiency.

Profession vs Function

Improved accuracy of reporting against the Profession and Function, allowing for greater insight into the size and shape of both.

Job Family / Job Role

New and more granular insight and analysis into the size, shape and professionalisation of Job Families and Job Roles within the Professions.

Evolving Skills

Utilising AI to link current market skills to job roles across the Professions, ensuring that the Civil Service is developing and recruiting the right skills within the current market climate.

Strategic Workforce Planning

Improved analysis on current workforce skills, and projecting what is required in the future. Allowing for more effective and efficient future workforce planning.

Professionalisation

Professional accreditations and qualifications linked to the position, including the employee filling the position, allowing the Civil Service to understand the level of professionalisation across the professions.

Talent Management

Better coordination between technology and Career Frameworks, allowing for improved tracking of talent against proficiency levels and employees transitioning along their career paths.

Position Management Driving Interoperability

Effective position management relies on the seamless interaction of several key systems that support HR functions across the Civil Service. These include Cluster ERP systems, recruitment platforms, and learning platforms.

ERP systems are fundamental for managing core HR processes such as payroll, finance, and comprehensive employee data. These systems, along with the Cluster Design from the Shared Services Strategy for Government aim to standardise and streamline administrative functions.

Recruitment platforms are essential for attracting and onboarding talent, with Civil Service Jobs serving as the primary platform for advertising vacancies and managing applications. The Government Recruitment Service (GRS) plays a central role in delivering recruitment services and ensuring the efficient hiring of capable civil servants.

Learning platforms provide access to a wide range of development opportunities for civil servants. Civil Service Learning (CSL) has been a key platform for offering courses and resources, and the Government Skills Campus aims to further enhance access to and tracking of learning and skills development. Historically, a significant challenge has been the prevalence of siloed, departmental-based systems that operate independently, hindering efficient data sharing and integrated processes across the Civil Service. Cluster design, convergence to NOVA Functional Reference Model, the Integration Blueprint and common language to Position Management provides an enabler to breakdown previous interoperability boundaries.

A common language to Position Management allows the Civil Service to enable the interoperable benefits by streamlining manual processes and utilising linked technologies to drive efficiencies, delivering a better connected and data mature Civil Service.

All HR systems are data driven and connected through the Central Integration Hub, providing a streamlined approach to data sharing and automation across the HR landscape.

How is Position Management Defined?

Position Management in the Civil Service is built on convergence of a common language of data standards and data fields, providing the foundation to deliver and enable a more automated, and interoperable Civil Service.

Data Standards

1. Professions
2. Job Families
3. Job Roles
4. Skills

Technologies

1. Recruitment Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
2. Cluster Enterprise Resource Platform (ERP)
3. Government Skills Campus

What defines a position?

Positions are composite of data items based on a number of data standards either created specifically for Position Management in the Civil Service, or utilise data standards delivered as part of the Functional Convergence Programme and part of NOVA Functional Reference Model data dictionary.

Data Item	Description
Function	Positions which are funded by a function will have the function aligned.
Profession	All employees should be aligned to one of the professions within the Civil Service.
Job Family	Where applicable, employees will sit within a job family with their profession.
Job Role	Employees will fill a Job Role within the Job Family, where applicable.
Grade	Every employee shall be aligned to a Civil Service grade.
Skills	Skills and proficiency levels for job roles set by profession career frameworks and within the skills taxonomy.
Role Start Date	The date the resource started the role.
Worker Type	Whether the role is filled by a Civil Servant, Contractor, Consultant etc.

• Qualifications should be included in the position as and when required for the job role. Not all job roles in the Civil Service require a qualification, some professions job roles this will be mandatory, this should be used appropriately for the job and profession.
• Allowances should be linked to the individual’s appointment and specific accreditations/skills, not automatically to a position or chair.

Job Role vs Job Title

Job Role and Job Title difference can lead to confusion whereby they are used interchangeably within the Civil Service. To support the cultural change and implementation the following definitions have been created to explain the difference.

Job Role

• Defined by the profession.
• Specific links to Career Frameworks for clarity on tasks and skills.
• Uniquely defined to ensure roles are specific identifiers.
• Tech agnostic, allowing interoperability and automation between systems and platforms.
• Generic terms that Civil Servants can align themselves with.

Job Title

• Used in recruitment as part of attraction.
• Unique to the employee.
• May include different job families or professions to reflect the employee expanded remit and objectives.
• Provides a clear but short description of their role for internal and external stakeholders.
• Flexible to reflect the changes within the workplace, or the employee’s career.
• Not tech agnostic or generic.

Job Role Catalogue

• 30+ Professions
• 130+ Job Families
• 2900+ Job Roles

A Civil Service Job Role Catalogue has been created to provide a foundation of roles across the 30+ Civil Service professions, leading to a comprehensive catalogue of over 2900 common roles from across the Civil Service.

Each profession within the Civil Service, along with the five Clusters, Government Skills, Government Recruitment Service and Cabinet Office Digital have collaborated to deliver this catalogue. This allows for a consistent approach to documenting job roles, as well as professional links to the professions Career Frameworks.

Developing this further, each job role has been developed to link specifically to Government Skills, and their Skills Taxonomy, allowing for Position Management to have consistent skills and proficiency levels across the Civil Service, leveraging technology to improve skills, talent and the navigation through a professions Career Frameworks.

The Civil Service Job Role Catalogue is a NOVA Data Standard artefact and is mandated under the People Functional Standard GovS003, and Finance Functional Standard GovS006. The Job Role Catalogue can be accessed through the NOVA Functional Reference Model.

Position Hierarchy Naming Convention

ERP designs for Position Management and the Skills Platform require roles to be uniquely defined for each grade. This has been contradictory to some roles which a single term role may span multiple grades within professions, with varying degrees of skills and proficiency allowing for Career progression.

Solutions to this has been profession lead, with a naming convention defined that supports their unique profession and wider global market.

Whereby no naming convention existed, analysis conducted on naming conventions from across all professions provided a recommended common approach. This supported professions with common terms where required.

Grade	Option 1	Option 2
SCS 2	Director	Director
SCS 1	Deputy Director	Deputy Director
Grade 6	Head of	Head of
Grade 7	Lead	Lead
SEO	Senior	Manager
HEO	Manager	Advisor
EO	Advisor	Officer
AO	Officer	Assistant
AA	Assistant	Administrative Assistant

Workers Filling Positions

Employees will fill a role on an ERP and within a profession. Employees may have roles which cut across job families and job roles, in these instances the employee will be mapped into the role whereby they are mostly responsible or resourced for. There may be instances where further considerations are required for some workers, such as:

Local Job Roles

The Civil Service Job Role Catalogue provides over 2900 consistent job roles across the Civil Service which are linked to professions.

Not all job roles feature in the job role catalogue. Roles which are undertaken solely in a single organisation (e.g. Ambassadors, Astronauts) are local level roles which will feature on the Cluster Job Role Catalogue to capture the variance of different roles local to the departments within the Cluster.

Fast Stream

Those who are successful in applying for the Civil Service Fast Stream will be managed and paid through the Civil Service Fast Stream ERP system, they’ll be positioned into a role within their profession.

Fast Streamers will be required to have a profile on their host department ERP system, this must reflect the same role and position which is built into the Civil Service Fast Stream ERP to ensure professional alignment across the platforms.

Contingent Labour / Casual Workers

Contingent Labour and Casual Workers may map into a role within an ERP, this would be required where the “Worker” is paid by the organisation to fulfil a role on a temporary basis.

Interns would be classified as a casual worker under “Worker Type” data standard. Interns may fill a role if they are on paid by the organisation to fulfil a role on a temporary basis. However, an Intern, if unpaid and provided it being short term i.e. summer holiday placement, this would not require the intern to be placed into a role.

Position Management and Government Skills Campus

Interoperability is a key driver for success, driving streamlined process and data sharing across the HR landscape.

The Government Skills Campus (GSC) will provide a single view on the learning offer right across the Government, intelligently sign posting the user to the most relevant learning based on their learner profile and current skills.

By integrating across existing systems, the platform will enable us to collect skills data at a team, profession, department or cross-government level in order to pinpoint the skills we have as well as those we need to develop.

Underpinning this is Position Management and the Professions, allowing GSC to utilise the Job Role Catalogue as a key data artefact to map Skills Taxonomy into the job roles.

This creates a powerful, collaborative and joined up data architecture that will drive consistency in data.

This data will allow the Civil Service to strategically plan, redeploy and develop our workforce to meet our organisational objectives and better serve the public.

Position Management that links to Career Frameworks

Position Management enables all employees to be linked to a specific profession, driving professionalisation of the Civil Service, while also creating clear links between our technologies, Skills, Career Frameworks and Professional Standards. The example below sets how skills link into the profile of a HR professional.

ERP Position Profile

Profession: People / HR

Job Family: HR Business Partner

Job Role: Assistant HRBP

Grade: SEO

Qualification: CIPD Associate Membership/Level 3 Certificate in HR Practice or Level 5

Career Framework Key Skills

• Excellent relationship and stakeholder management – shaping and influencing in wider business context
• Analytical – developing insights and trends for evidence-based decisions
• Good HR expertise in breadth of HR to support business build good people practices.

Proficiency Levels against Skill Taxonomy

Awareness / Working / Practitioner / Strategic

• People practice
• Culture and behaviour
• Business acumen
• Evidence based practice
• Technology and People
• Change

The example for the Project Delivery Profession.

ERP Position Profile

Profession: Project Delivery

Job Family: Project Delivery Specialists

Job Role: Project Planner

Grade: HEO

Qualification: PRINCE2 Practitioner / Agile Project Management Practitioner

Career Framework Key Skills

• Lead on planning activity to support delivery of the business case benefits and outcomes
• Challenge and test project assumptions to ensure that plans are realistic and achievable.
• Manage the planning team to identify, develop and deploy planning resources.

Proficiency Levels against Skill Taxonomy

Awareness / Working / Practitioner / Strategic

• Credible action
• Collaboration
• Influencing
• Conflict resolution
• Resilience
• Innovation

Functions vs Professions

Functions and Professions are fundamental to the delivering Civil Service priorities, however while the two are interlinked, it is important to understand the difference between them.

Government Functions

Functions are groupings across government that manage functional work such as human resources, commercial, or finance. Functions form a framework for collaboration within organisations and across organisational boundaries, to support efficient and effective delivery of policy, outcomes and services. Government functional standard GovS 001 sets consistent expectations for management of the functions, including roles and accountabilities.

A function is made up of employees across various Civil Service Professions to enable delivery of the function. A member of any profession can support any type of functional work, for example to provide professional commercial or policy advice about aspects of work managed by the Project Delivery function; or professional tax advice about aspects of work managed by the counter fraud function. Not all employees in the Civil Service work in functions, over two thirds of employees do not work in a function*.

Government Professions

Professions specifically focus on our people, with aims to develop the capability of a group of people with particular skills, knowledge or expertise, and who work across government on behalf of organisations and functions. Each profession is underpinned by a Career Framework, Skills Framework or Professional Standards to support their employees through their professional career journey. Some Functions are also Professions, while some professions are solely “Specialist”. All employees within the Civil Service should align to a profession.

*Source: Analysis of Annual Civil Service Employment Survey (ACSES) 2024.

Functions, Professions and our People

Functions and Professions are linked by our employees who provide the professional skills and expertise to deliver functional strategic objectives for the Civil Service.

Functions

Functions deliver specific work as set out by their Strategic Plans, and bound by Functional Standards, which underpins the expert delivery across the Civil Service.

People

Deliver the objectives of the function and wider Civil Service, with skills and expertise related to the profession.

Professions

Focus on people, building capability and professionalisation.

Underpinned by a Career / Skill framework, and may require professional accreditation.

Functions and Professions Principles

Defining roles within a Function must be underpinned by a set of principles to ensure that organisations are following a consistent approach. There’s three core principles which must be considered:

1. Organisation Design

Roles must be considered as part of Organisational Design, ensuring that the organisation is suitably structured and that we are recruiting the right skills to meet the requirements of organisational objectives.

2. Job Requisition

New roles must go through a job requisition process, ensuring that we’ve considered organisation design, ensuring that we employing the right professional skills, we have purpose and need for a new hire, and have the required budget in place to recruit.

3. How function is recorded into the role

The function is determined around three elements, meeting one of more of these would define the role within the function:

• SCS level should define whether the work is related to the function; anyone employed within the hierarchy of a Head of Function would be delivering work for the function. Those working within a hierarchy for a Chief People, Chief Commercial, or Chief Finance Officers would be delivering for the respective Function.
• Cost centres should be linked to business units and link back to a Director within a functional hierarchy, where applicable.
• Delivery of a functional standard / functional strategy - if you are employed to deliver a role within a function, the role should help the function meet its delivery against the Functional Strategy and Functional Standard.

Functions and Professions aligned in Position Management via hierarchical design

Job roles that sit within a function on an ERP could be determined by the directorate or business unit whereby the job role is budget for (linked to a cost centre) and created into i.e. Finance / HR / Commercial. This could be linked to Director or Deputy Director hierarchies within an ERP.

Within a directorate or business unit, there will be a hierarchy of employees undertaking roles specific to the functions strategic objective. This will be a mix of different professions within the functional area. Any job role featured within a job role catalogue could sit in any Function. The below example shows how different roles within the HR Function cross between other professions, all contributing to delivery of the strategic objectives of the function. This approach may not be relevant for all Functions, a Function may be structured differently with different parts of the function organised in multiple or across hierarchies.

HR Function

• HRBP (Human Resources)
  • HRBP Support (Human Resources)
  • Business Support (Operational Delivery)
• Project Manager (Project Delivery)
  • Information Manager (Knowledge and Information Management)
  • Project Support (Project Delivery)
• Lead Data Analyst (Digital and Data)
  • Strategic Workforce Planner (Human Resources)
  • Management Accounting Advisor (Finance)

Case Studies of Roles within Functions and Professions

Project Manager

Function: Commercial

Profession: Project Delivery

The role for a Project Manager has been employed as part of the Commercial Function to deliver a key IT transformation project as part of the Commercial Functional Strategy which is underpinned by the Functional Standards. The employee is aligned to the Project Delivery profession bringing specific skills and expertise into the function.

HR Business Partner

Function: People

Profession: HR

The role of the HR Business Partner has been employed within the People Function, their Director is a HR Director and the role supports against the deliver of the People Functional Strategy underpinned by the GovS 003 People Functional Standard. The Employee is professionally aligned to the HR Profession and is CIPD accredited.

Strategic Communication Manager

Function: Communications

Profession: Communications

The role of Strategic Communication Manager has been employed as part of delivering communications to the public on a change to Government policy. This role is sit within the Communications function as Policy is a profession. The employee aligns to the Communications profession and bring a specific set of skills and experience to the Civil Service.

Senior Risk Adviser

Function: Finance

Profession: Risk Management

The role of Senior Risk Advisor has been employed within the Finance Function, contributing to the development of the Risk Management Framework, and complaint against the Orange Book requirements to improve risk maturity. The employee aligns into the Risk Management profession.

Economist

Function: Analysis

Profession: Economist

The role of the Economist has been employed within the Analysis Function to support policy development and public service delivery. The employee aligns into the Government Economic Service profession, which supports the professional development of economists at each stage of their career.

Commercial Manager

Function: Property

Profession: Commercial

The role is leading the commercial process for the large scale contracts to deliver facilities management services on the Government estate. Post holders are commercial professionals embedded in property teams, using their commercial skills combined with an in-depth knowledge of facilities management in order to ensure value for money and ensure a good quality.

Review Technical Consultant

Function: Counter Fraud

Profession: Tax

The role of the Review Technical Consultant has been employed within the Counter Fraud Function to independently review appealable decisions requested by our customers. The employee aligns to the Tax Profession as they use their tax knowledge to improve the quality of compliance activity.

Lead Technical Architect

Function: People

Profession: Digital and Data

The role of the Lead Technical Architect has been employed within the People Function to support the delivery of an IT solution. This will deliver valuable efficiency savings within organisation. The employee brings expertise to the People Function but aligns into the Digital and Data profession.

For more information on Global HR Design Position Management

Contact – peoplefunction@cabinetoffice.gov.uk