Taxonomy

The taxonomy is the structured vocabulary your workspace uses to describe what people can do — and where in the economy they sit. Every role's required competencies, every assessment, every employee's profile, and every workspace's sector all reference the same shared taxonomy.

The four levels

The taxonomy has exactly four levels, narrowing from the broadest economic grouping down to a single observable capability:

1. Sector — the broad part of the economy a workspace operates in (e.g., Information Technology, Financial Services, Healthcare, Cybersecurity). One sector per workspace, chosen during onboarding.
2. Sub-sector — a narrower slice within a sector (e.g., under Information Technology: Software Engineering, Data & AI, Cloud Infrastructure). A sub-sector can belong to more than one parent sector when the same specialty is shared across the economy.
3. Job family — a grouping of related roles with a common competency profile (e.g., Backend Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Data Engineer). A job family can sit under more than one sub-sector — many roles span specialties.
4. Competency — the leaf level: a single capability with a name, type, bilingual description, and four proficiency levels. Competencies are reusable; a single competency can be required by job families across many sub-sectors.

The two many-to-many edges — sub-sector to sector, and job family to sub-sector — exist because the labour market does not actually fit a clean tree. Site Reliability Engineering genuinely belongs under both Cloud Infrastructure and Software Engineering; forcing a single parent would distort the data.

General Administration — in every sector

Alongside its specialist sub-sectors, every sector ships a shared General Administration sub-sector covering the organization-management roles that exist no matter what the business does. Its job families are the executive (CXO) leadership team: Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Human Resources Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Legal Officer, and Chief Risk and Compliance Officer.

Each role carries the full set of the sector's general competencies plus the management-relevant technical competencies drawn from that sector's own catalogue — so a CFO in Manufacturing and a CFO in Health share the same leadership shape but pick up the financial and governance competencies defined for their respective sectors. Because job families are global, choosing General Administration during onboarding gives every workspace a ready-made leadership layer to map its executives onto.

During onboarding, General Administration is pre-selected by default (marked with a Default badge on the sub-sector step) so every new workspace starts with its leadership layer. It is not mandatory — you can deselect it before continuing, and once you save your sub-sector choice that decision is respected on later visits.

What a competency looks like

Each competency in the taxonomy ships with:

• Type — either Technical (domain-specific, e.g., Kubernetes, IFRS) or General (cross-domain, e.g., Written Communication, Stakeholder Management).
• Description — a one-paragraph bilingual definition of what the competency is.
• Four proficiency levels — Beginner, Developing, Proficient, Expert. Each level has its own bilingual descriptor saying what the person actually does at that level — observable behaviour, not abstract qualities ("Leads a full-unit audit aligned to SAMA", "Designs Zero-Trust security architecture").

The four-level scale is uniform across every competency in the taxonomy, so a Proficient in one competency carries the same meaning as a Proficient in any other.

How onboarding maps to it

When a new HR Administrator creates a workspace, the onboarding flow asks them to:

1. Pick the workspace sector.
2. Confirm the sub-sectors their organisation operates in (one or more).
3. Confirm the job families they expect to hire for (one or more).
4. Optionally pre-select a starter set of competencies — or skip and pick them later when authoring roles.

Once onboarding is complete, the workspace can see its slice of the taxonomy: only the sub-sectors, job families, and competencies relevant to its sector. Other sectors' content stays out of the way.

Where to find it

The global taxonomy is read-only. Workspaces select from it during onboarding and surface their slice across three places:

• Settings → Sector & sub-sectors — your sector is locked after onboarding; sub-sectors are editable. Removing a sub-sector pops a confirm dialog that lists the job families + competencies that will cascade-delete with it.
• Sidebar → Job family — every selected job family lands here as a row, grouped by its sub-sector, with a colored indicator on each row marking its mandate (see below). Use + New job family to extend the workspace — the wizard scopes by sub-sector, then either picks a catalog family or creates a brand-new one. AI suggestions still drive competencies + description. Open any family and click Edit to update its linked technical and general competencies and to change its mandate — the mandate is scoped to your workspace, so you can change it even on shared-catalog families (any mandate already held by another instance of the same family is greyed out). For families you created yourself you can also rename them and rewrite the description. The edit page has a danger zone to delete a custom family outright, or remove a catalog family from your workspace (it stays in the shared catalog for everyone else).
• Sidebar → Competencies — every catalog-linked or custom competency lands here. + New competency prompts for one or more sub-sectors, the job families within them, then the competency details — the new competency becomes part of the catalog and is linked to those families.

Job family mandates

Every job family a workspace adopts is adopted under a mandate — the answer to what kind of work does this family exist to do? There are exactly three:

A single job family can be adopted under more than one mandate in the same workspace. An Inspection family, for example, can be adopted once as Regulatory (the team that writes and enforces the standard) and again as Executive (the team that actually runs inspections day to day) — each adoption is an independent instance with its own competencies, Job Descriptions, and headcount.

From any job family's detail page (or its edit page), Duplicate creates a fresh instance under a mandate the family isn't using yet, and lets you choose what to carry over: its Job Descriptions (with their required-competency maps) and the Positions under those Job Descriptions (copying Positions requires copying Job Descriptions). Competencies are never copied — the duplicate is linked to the same catalog job family, so it draws on that family's competencies rather than a separate copy. People are never copied either — cloned Positions start empty and closed to hiring, so duplication never moves an employee. The Duplicate action disappears once all three mandates are taken.

The Job families page lists every adopted instance under its sub-sector, and each row carries a mandate-colored indicator — Regulatory, Executive, or Internal — so you can read both a family's place in the taxonomy and the kind of work it does at a glance. The Org chart renders the same instances as a mandate-grouped grid of filled/desired headcount, with no reporting lines between them.

What is on the watch list

• HR Administrator taxonomy editor — deeper editing of catalog descriptors per workspace.
• Sector-specific assessment libraries — assessment templates that automatically match the workspace's sector.

Next

Hiring configuration — the auto-advance threshold and email templates — is covered next.