The Capability Architecture Specialist establishes and administers Fortive's enterprise skills taxonomy, beginning with an externally acquired library and adapting it to the language, roles and strategic capabilities that matter across Fortive. The role is accountable for taxonomy integrity, metadata quality, governance workflows, version control, disciplined change management, and vendor management.
This is a hands-on data stewardship role with meaningful stakeholder influence. The Specialist partners with Talent Partners, HRBPs, HR Operations, HR Technology and subject matter experts to evaluate requests, resolve ambiguity and protect enterprise consistency. The role must be able to explain decisions clearly and challenge unsupported changes while remaining pragmatic and service oriented.
OPERATING MODEL
1 ARCHITECTURE & INTEGRITY2 GOVERNANCE & CHANGE3 ENABLEMENT & ADOPTIONOwn the skills taxonomy structure, standards, metadata and quality.Run transparent intake, review, approval and version-control processes.Help HR teams use the architecture consistently in talent decisions and systems.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES ESTABLISH AND MAINTAIN THE ENTERPRISE CAPABILITY ARCHITECTURE
- Stand up Fortive's enterprise skills taxonomy from the ground up using an externally acquired skills library as the starting point.
- Define the architecture, including domains, categories, skills, definitions, aliases, proficiency descriptors, relationships and required metadata.
- Create clear design principles and naming standards that balance external market language with Fortive-specific business relevance.
- Partner with Talent Partners, HRBPs and functional subject matter experts to validate priority skill families and translate business needs into scalable taxonomy updates.
- Establish the initial baseline, migration approach and release plan, including the treatment of duplicates, legacy terms and local variants.
ADMINISTER TAXONOMY DATA & QUALITY
- Maintain the authoritative taxonomy record and execute additions, revisions, and archival decisions with precision.
- Apply data-quality controls to identify duplicates, conflicting definitions, inconsistent levels, missing metadata and broken relationships.
- Maintain documentation, decision logs, version history and release notes so changes are traceable, explainable and auditable.
- Coordinate scheduled refreshes using vendor updates, internal demand signals, emerging technology and changing business capability requirements.
- Prepare clean, structured data files and requirements for configuration or integration by HR Technology and platform owners.
GOVERN REQUESTS & MANAGE STAKEHOLDERS
- Design and operate a practical intake, triage, review and approval process for taxonomy changes across enterprise and OpCo stakeholders.
- Evaluate requests against agreed criteria, evidence and enterprise standards rather than stakeholder seniority or local preference.
- Resolve conflicting requests, recommend the best enterprise solution and escalate only where a genuine policy or strategic decision is required.
- Respond confidently and constructively to challenge from senior HRBPs and leaders, explaining trade-offs and protecting the usability of the enterprise architecture.
- Set clear expectations on scope, decision rights, service levels and release timing, and communicate outcomes with transparency and respect.
ENABLE CONSISTENT USE & CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
- Create practical guidance, templates and self-service resources that help HR teams select and apply skills consistently.
- Support Talent Partners and HRBPs with taxonomy queries and recommendations for workforce planning, talent reviews, capability assessment, career architecture and development use cases.
- Partner with HR Operations, HR Technology, Talent Acquisition, and Learning to promote consistent use across processes and platforms.
- Monitor adoption, recurring queries, exception patterns and data-quality indicators to identify opportunities to simplify and improve the architecture.
- Apply Fortive Business System principles to make governance faster, clearer and more scalable over time.
SCOPE & DECISION RIGHTS
OWNSINFLUENCESDOES NOT OWN
- Enterprise skills taxonomy data and metadata
- Taxonomy design and naming standards
- Change intake, quality controls and version history
- Recommendations on add, change, merge and retire decisions
- Priority capability and skill families
- How skills are represented in HR processes and systems
- External library and vendor requirements
- Adoption, usability and stakeholder understanding
- Business or OpCo capability strategy
- Final business decisions about capability investment
- HR platforms, integrations or technical configuration
- Job architecture, compensation architecture or learning content
EXPERIENCE & QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's degree in human resources, business, information management, data management or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Three or more years of experience in HR Operations, HR data management, HR technology support, job or skills architecture, learning operations, talent operations, knowledge management or a related discipline.
- Demonstrated experience maintaining structured data, controlled vocabularies, catalogs, taxonomies, master data or similarly governed content.
- Strong data-management discipline, including attention to detail, data validation, documentation, version control and process compliance.
- Ability to learn complex frameworks quickly, identify patterns and translate ambiguous requests into precise, scalable data solutions.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the judgment and confidence to explain decisions, hold boundaries and manage disagreement with senior stakeholders.
- Demonstrated customer orientation and practical problem solving, balancing enterprise standards with legitimate business needs.
- Experience working with a commercial skills library, skills intelligence platform or job architecture is preferred but not required.
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