How AI can save you 40+ hours building career frameworks

We all know that AI (artificial intelligence) is here to stay. That much is clear. We also know that it has some very beneficial aspects, and also some less beneficial aspects, to it. But whichever way you look at it, AI does offer massive advantages… and one of those is in saving time.

A 2025 study revealed that “66% of HR professionals use AI daily – a rise of 12% on 2024 – but only 3.6% of organisations have formally embedded it into HR.” Having said that, further research has shown that 55% of UK organisations are investing in AI for training, recruitment, and HR support – a rise of 20% on last year.

This article will explore how AI-driven tools are reshaping the way career frameworks are approached, backed up by the latest statistics.

First let’s delve into the pain points surrounding the creation of traditional career frameworks:

Labour-intensive: Career frameworks can take between 40 and 60 hours to build, because of the time it takes to map roles, update skills, and write job profiles.

Inconsistency: Information written by a variety of staff can differ in voice, tone, and terminology, which leads to confusion and a lack of alignment across the teams.

Outdated: With the job market moving at such a rapid pace, mapped career journeys could soon become obsolete due to changing market requirements or evolving skills, such as the surge for roles in green and tech jobs.

Delays: There is cross-team dependency, with HR departments having to rely on management to approve details of roles, which can cause major delays to the build.

Duplication: With no streamlined system, similar roles are created many times over under different titles, leading to unnecessary duplication.

Research: Extensive research and validation is required when mapping skills and aligning frameworks, taking up vast amounts of time.

Inefficient collaboration: The process becomes slow and hard to track when there are numerous revisions between leadership teams, HR, and subject matter experts.

Building an AI career framework is a different kettle of fish and will open up a whole new world of possibilities, empowering HR teams by doing away with mundane tasks so that they can concentrate on more strategic talent development.

Labour-intensive? AI can draft, structure, and format frameworks in seconds, massively reducing the team’s workload. 

Inconsistency? AI can create a consistent, professional, and inclusive voice across all competency descriptions and role profiles.

Outdated? Frameworks can be refreshed quickly using AI, which automatically uses real-time job market data.

Delays? There’s no need for lots of stakeholders to input their information, when AI can draft basic profiles from existing data.

Duplication? It’s easy for AI to seek out similarities, consolidate positions, and highlight any improvements to be made to the structure of the framework.

Research? AI automatically matches roles with the relevant skills from available databases.

Inefficient collaboration? There’s no need for back and forth, as AI can centralise inputs and integrate feedback in real time.

This sophisticated technology automates mundane tasks, such as updating and tracking skills profiles, so that companies have the capacity to analyse staff capabilities against market criteria. They can then obtain immediate insights into any skills gaps.

While traditional career frameworks adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, an AI career framework adopts a more personalised model where staff are offered bespoke recommendations that tally with their skill level and future career aspirations. This improves the effectiveness of training while reducing the time it takes to learn.

Instead of relying on outdated spreadsheets or irregular assessments, an AI career framework can provide up-to-date and accurate profiles of employee skills and capabilities without the need to have manual updates. It can swiftly pinpoint those employees that possess the right skills for emerging roles, which reduces the time to fill crucial positions and their associated hiring costs.

An AI career framework can predict the future needs of companies, helping them stay ahead of any changes in their industry by collating skill and talent development data. So, instead of having to react to any gaps in skills, companies can plan ahead for workforce progression which minimises disruption and helps them to maintain a competitive edge.

AI has no biases that often pervade traditional promotion or hiring processes, so using an AI career framework supports diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. This results in employees from diverse and ethnic backgrounds securing opportunities based on performance and capability alone.

There is compelling UK data that points towards the huge amounts of time that AI can save in administrative and content generation tasks that are similar to building career frameworks. So, while there is no specific study that relates to measuring the amount of time that is saved in specifically building career frameworks, there is a lot of comparable data that can be used. 

1. A government study, involving 20,000 civil servants, showed that using AI tools saved them 26 minutes a day, equivalent to nearly two weeks a year, when carrying out routine duties such as drafting documents, updating records, and preparing reports.
2. UK workers can save 390 hours a year (or 44 work days) by embracing AI techniques at work, according to a study from Visier.
3. A pilot scheme, launched by Google, found that employees across the UK could save 122 hours a year by adopting AI for administrative tasks.
4. For HR professionals, research showed that they saved three hours a week (or 156 hours a year) by using AI to boost efficiency.

With all these time-saving stats at your fingertips, it’s easy to see why building a career framework using AI can help, given that the tasks involved in this are all about compiling job profiles, streamlining career progression journeys, and formatting data. All these duties are perfect for AI to take on board.

Saving 40 hours building one AI career framework is certainly doable – especially so when HR teams are reporting time savings of over 30 hours a month on admin tasks alone.

For example, let’s take a medium-sized data engineering firm which needs to create 10 new job profiles. In days gone by, it would have taken the HR team about six hours per role, totalling 60 hours of work. With an AI career framework, that amount of time is cut by four fifths, down to 12 hours overall, freeing up the team to concentrate on upskilling and strategic onboarding of new recruits, while avoiding employee burnout or rising mental health issues.

Change can be difficult, especially to those set in their ways and not ready to embrace new ways of working. There may be concerns regarding:

• Data privacy or compliance
• Skills gaps
• Resistance to change

Open and honest communication across all departments is key here. Building confidence slowly but surely is vital. Start small, such as using AI to compile just one job profile, and note the benefits. By firstly building internal confidence with workers, the process can be scaled incrementally so they get used to the idea one step at a time.

Traditional methods used when building career frameworks stunt company growth by:

• Repeating work which AI can automate
• Relying on disjointed input from different members of an organisation
• Toiling for weeks on work that could take AI just a few hours 

That’s why creating AI career frameworks is the way to go, so HR leaders can:

• Reclaim their time to perform more complex tasks
• Remain consistent
• Unlock a data-based foundation to drive forward on developing talent

Now’s the time to explore the tools for AI career frameworks, onboarding, and role mapping.

If your organisation is considering outplacement services, contact us at the earliest opportunity to find out more.