Title Structure Reorganization

Its interesting to see the different types of employee title structure that are used by different companies, particularly those companies within the same industry.  In my industry (biotech) employee titles typically vary a great deal from one employer to the next.  For instance, at my first employer, I started as an Assistant Scientist and was promoted to Scientist 1 my first year there.  Then I jumped around a bit to two other companies and when I landed at my last company (previous to my current company) I was an Associate Scientist II.  What's interesting about all of this is that I was a full Scientist at my first job within a year.  By the time I started at my last employer, I had 5 years experience and was lower than a full Scientist yet I had a much higher salary than when I was a full Scientist before.  It really didn't make any sense.  The point of all of this is that there is no standard by which you can compare titles for positions from company to company, and it would be ideal if there was some sort of standard.

On the bright side, some biotech and pharmaceutical companies have taken steps to harmonize with the industry as a whole.  My company recently reorganized its title and salary structure to have a much smaller number of titles and created a more streamlined and transparent system for its employees.  It gets tricky however, when you start putting employees with varying backgrounds and varying years of experience into the same title/pay grade.  You'll sometimes have employees who were at different titles (scientist 1,II, and III for instance) and then lump them together at the same level under the new system.  This can cause some issues in the sense that someone who once had title seniority no longer does.  There can be a lot of bruised egos with changes such as this and some employees will be a bit disgruntled.  

I found this website on creating salary structures which I thought was rather relevant:

http://internationalhr.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/ten-steps-for-building-a-salary-structure/  but I'm still at a loss on finding anything to combat the troubles of the title situation.  I'm not sure how to solve this problem, and I'd be interested in hearing your comments about how to fix it.