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How RPF marks every role as legacy, future-ready, or hybrid — what each archetype means, who sets it, why future-ready roles must carry cited sources, and how the successor link chains a transformation together.
Every role in RPF carries an archetype: legacy (today), future-ready (tomorrow), or hybrid (the transitional step in between). The archetype is what turns a flat catalogue of roles into a transformation map — it's how we name the difference between a 2025 BIM Manager and a 2030 BIM Manager in the same discipline.
Three audiences read the archetype differently. Professional bodies read it as a sponsorship target — "sponsor the future-ready Architect pack." Org leaders read it as a destination — "where are our roles relative to future-ready?" Practitioners read it as a roadmap — "what's the path from where I am to where this market is going?"
A role archetype is a stable label on every role row in RPF that says where the role sits on the transformation arc: legacy (today's role, the starting point), future-ready (the role we're transforming toward), or hybrid (a transitional step between the two). The archetype is set by an admin in the role builder; it is not auto-detected from content.
The archetype is what makes RPF a transformation platform rather than a job-title registry. Without it, two roles called "BIM Manager" sit next to each other in the catalogue and look like duplicates. With it, the second is named as the future-ready successor of the first — and the role-diff surface can tell you exactly what changed.
Today's role — the starting point of a transformation. Legacy roles describe the work as it is being done now in the market. They don't need future-ready citations; they document the current state honestly.
The role we're transforming toward. Each item on a future-ready role must carry at least one SMC-grounded citation — the published evidence that justifies the change. This is the citation gate (§3.3 of the strategy memo).
A transitional step between legacy and future-ready. Hybrid roles describe the partial moves a market is making today — the BIM Manager who runs federated models but hasn't yet been asked to author the Exchange Information Requirements. Useful when a clean legacy→future-ready jump is too far for a single phase.
What does future-ready Architect / Engineer / Facility Manager look like in our jurisdiction, with cited evidence? The archetype is the artefact you sponsor. "Sponsor the future-ready Architect pack for Ireland" is a more compelling pitch than "sponsor a role-profile-flow pack" — see the body one-pager.
Where are our org's roles against the canonical future-ready roles for our jurisdiction, and what's the local adaptation? Filter the catalogue by archetype to see at a glance which of your discipline roles already have a published future-ready counterpart and which don't.
What does my role become in 5 years in my market, and what's the journey? Open the role detail of your current role, follow the successor link to the future-ready role, then open the role diff — the diff is your transformation roadmap.
Each supported jurisdiction publishes its own canonical future-ready role per discipline, sponsored by a body active in that market. There is no single global canonical future-ready Architect — Ireland's, Brazil's, and Canada's all differ in their cited materials, regulatory drivers, and procurement language.
The canonical future-ready role is the one any org-fork compares against. When an org-leader filters their catalogue to future-ready, the rows are either the canonical (published by a sponsoring body) or org-forked copies derived from it. The role-diff surface always lines up against the canonical in the org's jurisdiction.
Items on a future-ready role must carry at least one cited source — a Standards / Materials / Citations (SMC) reference that explains why this item belongs in the future-ready picture. This is the transformation-citations gate from §3.3 of the strategy memo, and it's the line that defends RPF from being read as opinion.
The gate fires at publish time. A future-ready role cannot be published if any of its items lacks a citation; the validation message tells the author which item is missing one and links to the citation picker. Legacy and hybrid roles are exempt — they document current practice, which is observed rather than cited.
Every role can carry a succeeds_role_id — a foreign key pointing to the role this one transforms from. A legacy BIM Manager (2025) might succeed nothing; a hybrid BIM Manager (2027) succeeds the legacy one; the future-ready BIM Manager (2030) succeeds the hybrid one. Chains can be any length, but typical transformation packs are 2–3 steps.
The successor link is what the role-diff surface uses to pre-select a comparison target. Open a role with a successor set, click the Diff tab in the builder (or visit /[lang]/roles/[slug]/diff), and the diff is auto-computed against the successor. You can override with ?vs=<slug> on the standalone route.
Your jurisdiction has no canonical future-ready role for this discipline yet — sponsor one, your body's attribution is permanent on the published role, and the diff surface lights up the moment the first org-fork is published.
