The Advancement job family group plays a key role in building and maintaining relationships that strengthen the University’s mission. Their work involves engaging alumni, donors, and other stakeholders, managing fundraising campaigns, planning events, and cultivating long-term support through strategic communication and donor stewardship.
If you'd like assistance in charting your career path, Career Navigation is here to provide guidance and support.
A Job Family is a specialty area within a broader field of work. It groups together roles that require similar skill sets, knowledge, and abilities. While a Job Family Group covers a wide professional category—like Advancement—a Job Family narrows it down to a specific focus, such as Development Research, Gift Planning, and Major Principles and Gifts. This structure helps clarify the types of work being done and supports clearer career development pathways.
These roles are responsible for managing donor information, processing gifts, and ensuring data accuracy of the Advancement functions. Employees are typically responsible for database management, reporting, donor research, and stewardship activities. Does not include fundraising positions.
These roles are responsible for securing financial support from businesses and philanthropic organizations. Employees are typically responsible for identifying potential partners, cultivating relationships, writing grant proposals, and managing gift agreements to advance UVA's institutional goals and priorities.
These roles are responsible for supporting fundraising efforts through strategic prospect research and data management. Employees are typically responsible for identifying potential donors, analyzing giving capacity and interests, managing prospect tracking systems, and providing insights that guide cultivation and solicitation strategies.
These roles focus on encouraging broad participation in fundraising efforts through strategic outreach and recurring gifts. Employees typically plan and implement annual giving campaigns, coordinate marketing and communications, manage donor engagement through events, and build relationships that foster ongoing support. These positions do not include Major or Principal Gift fundraising.
These roles focus on securing long-term philanthropic support through planned gifts such as bequests, charitable trusts, and annuities. Employees are typically responsible for working with donors to align their legacy goals with UVA’s mission, structuring complex gift agreements, and ensuring long-term stewardship of these contributions.
These roles focus on securing significant financial contributions from individual donors. Employees are responsible for identifying prospects, cultivating relationships, managing a portfolio of major and planned giving donors, and coordinating engagement between donors and University leadership to support UVA’s mission and priorities.
These roles are responsible for fostering meaningful relationships with existing donors to strengthen UVA’s culture of gratitude and ongoing engagement. Employees typically focus on recognizing donor impact, managing communications, organizing appreciation efforts, and ensuring donors feel connected to the University's mission and outcomes.
These roles have a variety of responsibilities across different aspects of advancement. Staff and leaders in these positions may engage in activities related to donor relations, fundraising, research, and events, providing flexible support to the overall advancement strategy.
A career stream is a category in the Career Journeys Job Framework that describes the general type of responsibilities a position has. It reflects the nature of the work—such as professional, clinical, operational, managerial, or executive—and helps clarify the kind of contribution the role makes to the University. Career streams, combined with job families, help employees understand how their work fits into the organization and identify potential paths for growth, whether within the same stream or by moving to another.
Career Streams in Career Journeys Job Framework Include:
Yes — you can move from one career stream to another if your job responsibilities change and align with the new stream.
For example, someone in the Operations and Service stream could move into the Professional stream by gaining the necessary education, training, or experience, or into the Management stream by taking on people-leadership responsibilities. Career streams aren’t fixed for life—they’re a way of describing your current role, not limiting your future opportunities
No — you don’t have to become a manager to reach the top of your career stream.
In Career Journeys, each stream has its own progression path. For example, in the Professional or Clinical Professional streams, you can advance in roles in a higher "level" that carry significant increases in influence, responsibility, and compensation without managing people.
Management is just one type of career stream, not the “top” of all streams. You can build a high-level career without shifting into people leadership—unless that’s the direction you want to go.
Levels reflect the typical knowledge, skills, and experience needed for roles at that stage. Within a career stream, several different jobs may share the same level, and not every level will always have an active position in every stream.
The differences between career levels are determined based on the scope/complexity of the position. Specifically, this means the jobs within a job family will differ in level based on duty and responsibility differences between profiles. Factors include the nature and scope of influence, the level of autonomy the position has to make decisions at various levels of impact, the nature of communication and audience, supervisory responsibilities and number/type of teams, and the level of expertise needed to fulfill position responsibilities.
Yes — you can move to a different job family group or job family if you apply for and are selected for a position in that area.
For example:
You might move from the Information Technology job family group into Finance if you gain relevant skills or education and are hired into a finance role.
Or you could shift from the Digital Media job family to Graphic Design within the Communications job family group if your work focus changes.
It’s not an automatic change — it happens when your role and responsibilities align with the requirements of the new job family group or job family, and you successfully secure that position through UVA’s traditional hiring process.
If most of a position’s responsibilities fall within one functional area, the position is assigned to the matching job family group or job family. If the work is more evenly spread across different areas, the job family group or job family is chosen based on which set of duties would be most important to highlight when recruiting for the role.
Faculty and student positions are not included in the Career Journeys Job Framework. However, they still receive a unique job profile and can use Career Journeys to explore jobs that are part of the framework.
Other positions not included are: Classified Staff, Temporary Employees, Professional Research Staff, Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs), Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), Student Workers, Residents and House Staff, UVA Physicians Group, and UVA Community Health.
To be classified in the management stream, a job’s main focus needs to be leading people. In most cases, this means supervising at least two team members and overseeing a distinct department as a core part of the role.
We welcome all employees to take some time to explore the Career Journeys Job Framework and get familiar with its key concepts before requesting more information or changes to their job profile. For example, it is good to know that your job profile title may not always match the business title you use every day, and supervising one employee does not automatically place a role in the management stream before reaching out.
You can learn more about your job profile and how it relates to other roles by reviewing the Job Framework resources on this page and on the training webpage. If, after doing so, you’d still like to know more about your classification, please email askhr@virginia.edu with a brief description of your questions and any relevant details. Our HR team will review your message and connect you with the right person to guide you through the next steps for understanding—or, if appropriate, reevaluating—your job profile.
If you have more questions, there are plenty of resources to help. Your manager is a great first stop, and you can also email HR for assistance. If your questions are about your personal career path, consider scheduling a meeting with Career Navigation.
Learn More about Career NavigationExplore your Career Journeys details and jobs in your Job Family
Access Your DashboardWhether you want to learn how to use the Dashboard or navigate the Job Directory, create a new Job Requisition, or understand how Career Journeys affects specific operations in your area, this page serves as your go-to guide.
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