Career Path Compensation Structure

Welcome to the GW Career Path! We invite you to use this tool to understand the range of paths that your career can take at GW.

HR Compensation has partnered with divisions and schools throughout our university to create our current job classification structure, GW Career Path. Our job classification structure places jobs together within career families and subfamilies based on the type and level of work performed in the job. The Career Path program  is intended to be a living structure.  While the architecture provides a necessary framework to categorize jobs, it’s also flexible to ensure we are working to meet our collective goals as a university.

The Career Path Structure is designed to:

  • Ensure that there is consistent, clear, and standardized language regarding position descriptions and career levels - no matter the job title or career family 
  • Provide an easy-to-view tool for the employee to navigate and discover the many ways that they can grow at the university, based on interests, skills, and qualifications
  • Ensure that our compensation and job design are consistent with industry compensation information, so that we remain competitive, year-after-year

Overview of the Structure

Through Career Path, GW has made a commitment to:

  • Employee growth within the university as a whole, instead of limiting employee growth within a school/division or department
  • Purposeful, not incremental, career growth, and the ability to progress both as an individual contributor and as a leader
  • Market-based pay, grounded in similar job duties and employee qualifications
  • Meaningful and consistent titling for the organization

There are 20 job families across all of the George Washington University (GW).

  • Each job family is grouped by the general type of work performed in the job.
  • Each job family is segmented by the specialty or concentration of work - these are called subfamilies.
  • Each subfamily has jobs with differing scopes – these are career streams.

Not all subfamilies are the same. For example, some job subfamilies have only a few job classifications, and some have many. Subfamilies both reflect what’s common in industry, and depend on the breadth of jobs at the university that perform that kind of work in a particular job family.

To find your classification:

Log into Talent@GW and navigate to “Home,” then “Universal Profile,” and then "User Record." Click on the down arrow next to "Career Path Attributes." If you have any questions about the Career Path structure or individual classifications, please reach out to your HR Business Partner.

Explore Your Career Path