Grading Playbook:
Set up a salary grade and pay range system for the entire company in 3 days ➡️

📘 Online course with Mike Pritula
🎬 3 video tutorials
🧰 7 ready-made templates and tools
🤖 5 AI prompts for generating forms
🗂 Homework review and student chat
📄 Certificate upon course completion

Take just this course for $500 All courses for $1,000

Sound familiar?

In 8 out of 10 companies, the compensation system isn’t a system at all, but rather a legacy of ad-hoc agreements. If this sounds like your situation, you need a pay grading system.
• Salaries in the company are set “historically”—no one remembers why one employee earns $2,000 while another in the same position earns $3,500.
• The CEO asks, “How much should the new Head of Marketing earn?”—and you have neither a range nor a justification.
• Employees find out each other’s salaries and come to you with complaints: “Why does Ivanov make more? We do the same work.”
• Payroll is growing faster than revenue, but it’s unclear where the overspending is—there’s no data for optimization.
• You tried to implement pay grades based on an online guide—spent two months on it, pitched it to the CEO, and a year later the system stopped working.

🧰 After completing the course, you will have

That’s what you’re really paying for. Not just grading theory—but seven ready-to-use files that your company can start using the very next day after the course.

📋 Grading System Maturity Checklist

15 items on a scoring scale. In just 10 minutes, you’ll see where your company stands and what critical issues need to be addressed first.
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Format: Excel 📈

📊 Point-factor grading model ⭐

Main course template. 6 factors, 7 levels each, with automatic calculation of points, grades, and salary ranges. Ready to be populated with your company’s job titles.
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Format: Excel 📈

💬 Library of Factors and Levels

26 factors, each with 7 predefined levels: qualifications, influence, communication, digital skills, complexity, responsibility, and more. You can tailor your set to your industry.
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Format: Word 📘

📚 Calibration Session Script

A guide for conducting a job evaluation with a team of 3–5 experts. Handouts for participants, guidelines, and dispute resolution procedures.
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Format: Word 📘

📈 Roadmap for Implementing Grading. C&B Metrics Dashboard

6-Month Plan: Pilot, Calibration, Rollout, Communication. Phases, milestones, responsible parties, risks, and KPIs for each phase.
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Format: Excel 📈

🗺 Presentation of the system's features to the CEO

10 slides: problem, solution, figures, ROI, risks, plan. Spaces for inserting your data are marked.⸻
Format: PowerPoint 🖥

Who is this Playbook for?

HRD at a growing company

The team has grown from 50 to 200 people, payroll costs are spiraling out of control, and we need a transparent system in place by the end of the quarter.

C&B Specialist

You're launching an update to your payroll system, so you need a practical tool—not just another framework straight out of a textbook.

HR Generalist at a company with 100–500 employees

I’ve become the company’s sole HR representative, and the CEO is asking me to “get the payroll in order,” but he hasn’t explained how.

HRBP at a large company

Whether you're preparing a request for the C&B department or defending changes within your division, you need a common language and hard numbers.

HR Consultant

If you do grading for clients, you need a ready-made methodology and templates so you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

Join the course participants' Telegram chat ⇢⇢⇢

Telegram chat

How the course is structured

No theoretical lectures. Three practical steps: from diagnosis to a working system.

☑️ Lesson 1: Why Use Grades, and Why 80% of Systems Fail Within a Year

If a company doesn’t have a pay grade system, salaries are set “by mutual agreement,” and within a year this turns into a chaotic mess of unfairness.

What is grading, and how does it differ from pay scales, pay bands, and job categories?
3 grading models: Hay, Mercer IPE, and point-factor (our approach)—which one to choose
5 common reasons for failure: “grades for the sake of it,” subjective factors, lack of market relevance, pay gap leakage, system stagnation
What businesses lose without grades: high turnover, overpayments, demotivation, inability to plan payroll
Quick assessment: diagnosing the maturity of your compensation system (15 points)

🧰 Tools: Grading System Maturity Checklist (15 items, point scale)
✔Result: You can see what stage of maturity his company is at and understand which of the six factors are critical specifically for your business

☑️ Lesson 2: Creating a Point-Factor Grading Model

Step by step, you evaluate all of the company’s positions based on 6 factors, resulting in 17 pay grades and salary ranges—all in a single workday.

Model Anatomy: 6 factors, weights, geometric progression of scores, calculation formula
Selecting factors by industry: manufacturing, IT, retail, media, services (based on 26 factors)
Level calibration: how to describe the 7 levels of each factor so that evaluators don’t argue
Filling-out demonstration: evaluating 10 typical positions live (from janitor to CEO)
Grouping into grades: how to derive 15–17 discrete grades from a continuous scoring scale
Salary range calculation: market alignment, 50% range width, mid-point, overlap between adjacent grades
Calibration session script: how to conduct an evaluation with a team of 3–5 experts without disputes
AI prompts: auto-generation of level descriptions by industry, job evaluation based on job descriptions

🧰 Tools:

Point-factor grading model (XLSX, master template) — based on your file, revised
Library of factors and levels (XLSX, 26 factors with pre-written level descriptions)
Calibration session script (DOCX, script + handout for experts)

✔ Result: Do you have a evaluated and graded list of all the company’s key positions, including salary ranges?

☑️ Lesson 3: Implementing Job Grades in the Company and the Relationship with C&B

Grades aren’t just an Excel file—they’re a system. Roll it out company-wide, link it to hiring, promotions, and bonuses, and back it up with ROI figures when presenting to the CEO.

The Role of Grading in the C&B System: Linking to Hiring Ranges, Promotions, Bonuses, and Benefits
RACI Matrix for Implementation: HRD, C&B, Managers, Finance, CEO — Who Is Responsible for What
6-Month Implementation Roadmap: Pilot → Calibration → Rollout → Communication → Support
Communication with employees: what to say, what NOT to say, how to respond to “why am I in this grade?”
5 common objections (CEO, managers, employees) + response scripts
Support cycle: annual review, adding new positions, updating ranges based on market conditions
Metrics dashboard: compa-ratio, range penetration, % of employees outside the range, payroll efficiency
Grading ROI: formula for calculating savings on turnover and overpayments + example for a company of 200 people
Presenting to the CEO: 10-slide presentation structure

🧰 Tools:

Grading Implementation Roadmap (XLSX, 6 months, phases, responsible parties, milestones)
C&B Metrics Dashboard (XLSX, compa-ratio, range penetration, formulas, and benchmarks)
Presentation for the CEO (PPTX, 10 slides with placeholders for data)

✔ Result: You’ll walk away with an implementation plan, metrics for monitoring, and a ready-to-go presentation to pitch the system to management

Take the course

Course fee

We've created affordable packages—choose the one that's right for you and start your journey with Mike Pritula

Here's what your finished grading looks like

You'll have a file just like this after the course

Do you want to be the part of the global HR group?

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How a course is taught

1

Webinar recording

You watch the recorded sessions at your own pace and study the material. We open 1 lesson per week

2

Homework with verification by the course author

Each webinar has a practical task that you must do to get a diploma

3

Case studies of participants

We communicate in Telegram chat and discuss participants' cases

4

Getting a diploma

Students who successfully complete the course assignments will receive a diploma at the end of the course

Diploma of HR Professional after completing the course
So coveted and valuable

Integrates into Linkedin and HH profiles
Each diploma has a unique code
QR code on the diploma leads to the online version
Impossible to forge
Issued on a certified Accredible platform (the same place where Rosetta Stone, Google, Udacity, Kaplan University and others issue certificates), look at an example

Registration

The course is taught by Mike Pritula, the creator of the Preply HR system 🦄

Founder of Mike Pritula Academy and PapaHR AI software
Built Preply's HR system on its way to a $1.2 billion valuation
Winner of two YouTube Silver Play Buttons for the largest HR channels on the platform
20 years in HR at Wargaming, Preply, iDeals, Starlightmedia, Alfa-Bank, and PeopleForce
Implemented over 50 HR projects
Formed 4 HR teams in different businesses
Top 10 best HR professionals in Eastern Europe
Engaged in online training since 2010
HRCI representative in the CIS, preparing for SHRM certification
Holder of PHRi, SHRM-CP, and HCI sHRBP certifications
Launched HRCI certification preparation courses in 10+ countries
Trained over 150,000 HR professionals and managers
Author of the HR competency model
Author of the most comprehensive HR audit checklist
HR Person of the Year in several European countries
Over 100 published articles and presentations
Over 5 million article views
Author of the books "Resume for a Million" and "AI in HR"

👨‍🎓150'000 students

That's exactly how many participants have taken our courses since 2012

🌍 185 countries

USA, India, Spain, France, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and others

📚 155+ courses

For HR, recruiters, executives and business people

🗣️ 30 languages

We train in different languages and make HR more accessible

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What you'll learn in the course

Intensive course work

On the course you are not a passive listener, but actively participate in online chat during the class, in Telegram chat between classes, as well as practicing all the knowledge gained and get feedback from the author of the course
Tools

You will get a large variety of proven tools that the author has tested in a wide variety of companies, many of which were developed personally, as well as examples from top companies
Ready-made solutions

You will not need to develop all the solutions yourself. You will immediately receive ready-made solutions based on the "Take and Do" principle. Your task will only be to adapt all the tools you receive to your company
Examples

We'll have plenty of examples and case studies from companies in a wide variety of industries on how they solved business challenges with HR tools. You will surely find many ideas for yourself
Homework

In your homework assignments, you will customize all the tools and solutions for your business, and the course author will personally check how you did.
Private chat

All students are added to a closed Telegram chat where they can ask questions and get help, share experiences, find like-minded people and friends.

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CONVENIENT STUDENT ACCOUNT

Training on the course: recorded classes, practice and support

All resources: webinar recordings, presentations, supplementary materials, are stored in your personal account.

For communication and support, all participants communicate in a dedicated Telegram chat room.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions (Q&A)

Job grading is a system for ranking positions within a company based on their value to the business. Positions are evaluated based on several factors (qualifications, influence, responsibility, etc.), assigned points, and grouped into grades. Each grade corresponds to a salary range. Job grading provides a transparent and fair compensation system.