Jen Svensen from Edgility Talent Partners continued our conversation about compensation, moving from philosophy to practical implementation.
Here are this session’s top 3 tips:
- Build scalable structures with clear job families and levels now. Job levels show career progression—how someone moves up the ladder as their role increases in complexity, impact, and management scope. Job families are functions (operations, academics, student services at small schools; IT, finance, HR, curriculum at larger ones). Build structures for where you’ll be in 2-3 years, not just today. This might mean creating job levels with no current roles yet because you anticipate needing them as you grow—preventing reactive decisions later.
- Develop clear, transparent stipend policies applied consistently across sites. Stipends come up constantly as pain points in both staff focus groups and leadership conversations. Pay for work extending the normal workday (coaching, after-school activities), work at higher job levels (department chairs), and hard-to-fill or growth-critical roles. Value people’s time—if someone puts in 1 hour/week for 30 weeks at $40/hour, pay $1,200, not an amount that works out to $10/hour. Write it in policy and implement consistently.
- Audit compensation regularly using only three legal differentiators. Look at everyone in the same role (or same job level for smaller groups) and compare their pay against experience, education, performance, and previous experience. There are only three legal reasons to differentiate pay: performance in the role, previous experience, and knowledge/skills/abilities. If you see pay differences, ensure they’re explained by one of these three categories—not something that could be interpreted as discrimination against a protected class.
Watch the Whole Conversation Here
