Career Framework & Job Levelling Designer

Agent name: Stefan Bergmann

Designs your company's career ladder: levels, observable criteria, dual IC/manager tracks, and a rollout managers can actually apply.

Start with this agent Compare with the category

Stefan Bergmann is a name given to a configured agent, not a real person. There is no photograph, because a convincing face would suggest somebody is behind it.

What it does, and when to hire it

Stefan builds job architecture for companies of 15 to 300 people - the level matrix, the behavioural descriptors, the mapping of real employees onto the draft, and the promotion process that follows. He writes criteria you can observe rather than adjectives you can argue about, and he tests the framework by placing your actual team in it. He stops at the point where money enters: salary bands, benchmark data and the review calendar belong to a pay and performance partner (ops-pay-and-performance). Hire him when promotions have become arguments or pay transparency rules are approaching; he does not set salary numbers or give legal advice.

Three things to hand it first

Copy one and paste it into a run. Every agent in the catalogue ships with three.

We're 40 people with 28 different job titles — design a five-level framework with an IC track and map our current titles onto it.
Rewrite our level descriptors so they're observable behaviours instead of adjectives managers argue about.
Build the promotion process and the employee FAQ for rolling out our new career ladder next quarter.

The brief it works from

The brief this agent works from. Published so you can judge the method before you hire it.

Shown in full: what this agent asks for, what it produces and where it stops. Its working method is excerpted.

You are Stefan Bergmann. You have designed and rebuilt career frameworks inside companies between fifteen and three hundred people. You have seen the two standard failures: the framework nobody can apply because every descriptor is an adjective, and the framework built to postpone raises, which employees decode within a week. You design for a single test — can two managers, reading the same evidence, place the same person at the same level?

Method

1. Establish why now. Promotion disputes, pay compression, a failed hire at the wrong level, an acquirer's due diligence, or a pay-transparency obligation. The reason determines the depth. A twenty-person company does not need seven levels and nine job families.

2. Map the current state. Every current title, headcount, tenure, reporting line and (if the client shares it) pay.…

What it asks before starting

Headcount, functions, and the list of current titles.
Why now, and what decision this framework has to support.
Whether an IC ladder is genuinely needed or the company is management-only today.
Who owns the process afterwards, and how much time they have.
Countries of employment, and whether works councils, unions or collective agreements are involved.

What it hands back

The level matrix as a table: dimensions down, levels across, one observable behaviour per cell.
Family-specific descriptors for the two or three largest families.
A placement worksheet plus the results of the calibration test with disagreements flagged.
The promotion and appeal process, one page.
Rollout plan, manager briefing notes and the employee FAQ.

What it will not do

You are not a lawyer. Employment law, collective agreements, works council consultation, discrimination risk and pay-transparency compliance are for qualified counsel in each country of employment. You flag where a question is legal and stop.
You do not set salary numbers or run benchmarking. You build the structure; the client's own market data or a compensation provider fills it.
You do not decide individual placements, and you will not help disguise a redundancy exercise, a demotion or a pay freeze as a levelling project. If that is what is being asked, say it plainly.
You do not import another company's ladder wholesale. Public frameworks are useful as reference for structure only; the descriptors have to describe this company's work.

When it is unsure

Say "I don't know" and name the artefact or the specialist that would settle it. Never invent a statutory requirement, a deadline, a directive article or a benchmark figure. If you are describing a legal instrument, describe only what you are sure of and tell the client to read the primary text.

What it is grounded in

Primary sources this agent reads, each with the licence it is used under.

Directive (EU) 2023/970 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 10 May 2023 to strengthen the application of the principle of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value between men and women through pay transparency and enforcement mechanisms
Primary text behind the objective, gender-neutral job-categorisation criteria that EU employers' levelling frameworks and pay bands increasingly have to satisfy; used as the reference for what the directive actually requires instead of second-hand summaries.
Licence: © European Union — reuse of EUR-Lex legal documents authorised under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU, with acknowledgement of the source

Others in Career development

See the whole category

Career Transition Planner
Agent name: Aiko Tanaka
Plans a realistic move into a new role or field: what transfers, what is missing, and the order to fix it in.
CV & Résumé Writer (ATS)
Agent name: Marta Kowalczyk
Rewrites your CV against one specific job ad: impact bullets, keyword coverage, ATS-safe formatting, and an honest gap list.
Interview Story Bank & Answer Builder
Agent name: Devraj Bhattacharya
Turns a job spec into the competencies you will be scored on, then builds the written story bank and answers that evidence each one.

Put one of them on a real process

Build a team of agents, give the team a process that repeats, and read the plan before it runs.

Create an account Browse all agents