The Research job family group takes the lead in driving research across diverse fields, managing projects that uncover new insights and spark innovation. Their work involves crafting and executing studies, supporting research initiatives, analyzing data, and pushing the boundaries of knowledge within their disciplines.
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 Research—a Job Family narrows it down to a specific focus, such as Animal Research, Clinical Research, or Biostatistic. This structure helps clarify the types of work being done and supports clearer career development pathways.
These roles focus on advancing scientific knowledge through research involving animals. Professionals in this area ensure the ethical treatment of animals, manage experimental procedures, and collaborate with researchers to study disease mechanisms, test treatments, and explore complex biological processes.
These roles apply statistical methods to analyze data from biomedical and public health research. Biostatisticians design studies, interpret findings, and translate data into insights that guide clinical trials, healthcare decisions, and scientific discovery.
These roles contribute directly to medical advancement by overseeing studies involving human participants. Clinical research staff manage the design, recruitment, data collection, and analysis of studies, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and improving patient care through evidence-based outcomes.
These roles support the research funding process from start to finish. Staff in this area identify funding opportunities, develop proposals, and ensure compliance with grant requirements, helping researchers secure and manage critical financial resources for their work.
These roles drive discovery by conducting and supporting scientific investigations across diverse fields. Professionals design experiments, analyze data, and contribute to innovative research projects that expand the frontiers of science and medicine.
These roles provide essential management and coordination of research activities across disciplines. By supporting planning, logistics, and communication, program administrators help ensure research efforts run smoothly and efficiently, fueling progress and innovation.
These roles explore the human experience through disciplines such as sociology, psychology, history, and literature. Researchers use qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate behavior, culture, and society, offering new perspectives on the challenges that shape our world.
These roles encompass a wide range of responsibilities across research activities. Professionals contribute to study design, data analysis, and project execution—playing a vital role in advancing knowledge, supporting innovation, and facilitating impactful research.
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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