500 employees at Danske Bank are assigned new job titles
"We want to move away from this overly hierarchical way of describing who we are," says Karsten Breum, Head of HR.
From 3,600 to 400 job titles
This is not the first time that Danske Bank adjusts the job titles of its employees. In 2019, 3,600 titles were reduced to 400 titles in English.
The new title structure was intended to provide HR and the employees with a better overview of skills and facilitate internal mobility in the Group.
The goal back then was to have as few job titles as possible while ensuring they still made sense, said Lisbeth Sørensen, Senior HR Consultant at Danske Bank.
“In recent years, more and more job titles have been added, especially because we’ve been allowed to claim that no job title really fits, so we'll have to come up with a new one," she said at the time to the Newsletter Finans, and continued:
“That’s what we are now putting a stop to. We’ll have 400 job titles to choose from, and managers won’t be able to approve a title on their own. New titles must be approved centrally; otherwise we’ll be drowning in job titles again in a few years or months.