There are tons of collection methods that aren't in the documentation but you can find them in the api http://laravel.com/api/4.2/ Maybe groupBy? And of course you can always do it the old fashion way by treating the collection like an array of objects.

groupBy would be before retrieval is complete. i was just thinking whether there is a more elegant way of filtering the collection.

so yeah i ended up using the old fashion way of treating the collection like an array of objects.

$allRoles = array();

foreach ($jobRoles as $jobRole) 
{
    $allRoles[$jobRole->slug] = $jobRole;
}

there are numerous collection methods for this

API for Support Collection

API for Eloquent Collection