How staff pay and grading is calculated in a University

Today I started wondering how institutions calculated pay and grading and ensured that there was equality across the institution in different roles. My University undertook a pay and grading exercise in 2005 but I wondered how equality was ensured since that time, since jobs have changed so much since then and I imagined that many roles seem to have taken on far more responsibility than was allowed at a similar level before. By searching the University website for 'pay and grading' I discovered that when a vacancy arises it is either classed as a new post or an existing post and if it is a new post the content of the roles is assessed using the HERA (Higher Education Role Analysis) Job Evaluation scheme in order to assign a grade.

Unfortunately the HERA tool is not very transparent, as only member institutions can log in. However there are some generic role examples provided that give you the general idea of what people at which level should be expected to do.

For my University you had to log in to see some things, which I was able to do, but Sheffield have been much more up front about it all and I liked their pages on the subjecthttp://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hr/thedeal/pay

I was glad to see that there seemed to be some method to the madness and judging by some of the generic roles they looked more or less OK, so I shall have to start wondering about something else now instead.