comparison between jobs and did little beyond providing generic job descriptions. True comparison between jobs, with rich and thorough taxonomy, was beyond the DOT and required a major rework.
To create the content used across worker characteristics, worker requirements, occupational requirements, and occupation-specific information, the O*Net designers relied on a combination of existing theory, logic, and their extensive practical experience working in the field performing job analysis. For example, O*Net’s taxonomy for work styles is based on the Big 5 personality model, which is the most highly researched and validated personality structure available today. Moreover, Wally was keen to point out that O*Net has a hierarchical structure that extends beyond the categorization of jobs. The hierarchy applies at a lower level to the work activities that drive these distinctions, accomplished by looking at differences among task complexity, importance, and frequency.
According to Wally, the greatest challenge in creating O*Net was not in drafting the content, but in gaining enough data to validate what was written. Realizing how enormous the task was of surveying job incumbents from each of the 821 jobs included in O*Net, the designers decided instead to opt for a practical approach. The designers targeted eighty jobs, which, surprisingly, made up 80 to 90 percent of people employed in the U.S. economy at the time. The design team went out to organizations with significant populations of employees working in these occupations and was warmly welcomed.
But the designers hit a roadblock. Despite a resounding initial interest from employers to participate, the response rate was shockingly poor, and solid data was captured for only thirty-five of the jobs. The design team went to Plan C and used other industrial psychologists to validate O*Net’s content. This is a lesson for any practitioner working on a large scale job analysis project. Gaining commitment from job incumbents or subject matter experts is usually not a problem until they see the full extent of what is asked of them.
With the content validated to the highest practical degree, O*Net provides a solid foundation for a range of talent management activities. Wally points out its usefulness in providing criteria for recruitment or reward decisions, identifying training requirements, guiding the redeployment of staff, and informing career guidance. As an area of future application, Wally believes that O*Net could be used to inform what types of reasonable accommodation could be made for people with disabilities. But for this to occur, he believes that O*Net requires even more granular content and extensive validation with job incumbents.
Unless your day job looks like mine, you are probably wondering why anyone would ever need to do job analysis again. It appears that O*Net has done it all. O*Net has a robust content model, applies to every conceivable role in the U.S. economy (which translates well to an international context), has been validated, and, best of all, is free to use courtesy of the U.S. Department of Labor (a link is provided in the notes section of this book).
Yet, for all these advantages, O*Net does not provide a total solution. The language used in O*Net is necessarily generic and therefore cannot account for how a given occupation is interpreted by each organization. One of the popular statistics HR professionals quote is a finding that it takes six to eight months for the average employee to become fully competent in his or her role. Assuming that a suitably qualified candidate was chosen (having the skills and experiences that would be listed on O*Net), then it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that the six to eight months a new employee requires is due to the way job roles are interpreted and connected to work within a specific organization.
Bottom line, job analysis is required to capture all the idiosyncrasies that fall between the cracks of the generic job descriptions. What makes Microsoft different from Apple or Coca-Cola different from Pepsi has a lot to do with the mix of talent they have working in their organizations and the processes that they have defined for how individuals work together. Competitive advantage from a people perspective is having insight into what makes your culture, processes, and roles different from those of your rivals and then finding and nurturing the talent according to what you find. It all depends on job analysis.
The Art and Science of Job Analysis
To conduct a job analysis, practitioners are tasked with defining the essence of a job, accomplished through interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, observation, or existing knowledge. This information is bundled together into a snapshot of a job that represents what employees are doing at that particular moment in time. As a job adapts and changes to new ways of working or different end products, the onus is on the practitioner to revise the job description. The reality is far from ideal, and I will talk more about this in a few minutes.
Below, I will present eight popular ways of conducting a job analysis. Each employs a slightly different way at gaining relevant information and, as a result, yields different information about tasks, behaviors, or personal attributes. No matter which combination of techniques is chosen, a successful job analysis is systematic (having a predefined objective and structure), comprehensive (gaining multiple, relevant viewpoints that represent the job), and timely (before any major staffing decisions are made). When done right, job analysis forms the basis for selection, appraisal, compensation, and development activities, as well as compliance with fairness legislation. Here are the main techniques trained practitioners utilize.
Job incumbents are asked to keep a written record of the work they accomplish, either after a specified period of time (e.g., hourly or daily) or when they switch between tasks. Individual accounts of the workday are compiled across job incumbents to discover the key activities that make up a particular job.
A trained observer watches job incumbents fulfill their work throughout the day, using a checklist of tasks as a reference. The observer keeps track of the frequency of tasks, duration, and accuracy of the items included in the checklist. The observer will often ask questions of the job incumbent about what he or she is doing, how he or she is doing it, and why it has to be done in order to fully capture key activities and necessary behaviors.
Trained observers take on the job for a set period of time. Through their experience, they take note of how they use their time, the tasks they are asked to accomplish, the approach they take in fulfilling tasks, and the required skills they should have to effectively accomplish their work. This technique is more appropriate for jobs that can be learned quickly or that take advantage of transferrable skills.
This technique involves breaking a job down into the typical tasks performed and then breaking these down into subtasks, usually through an interview with job incumbents or a line manager. The technique elicits information around the key objectives of a job and the skills and abilities that employees should have to fulfill them.
In this technique, a line manager is interviewed and presented with a series of staff comparisons. With each comparison, the manager is asked to differentiate how two staff members are different from a third staff member in their effectiveness in performing the job. The technique can elicit a broad range of content, from how someone treats colleagues or customers to the skills he or she brings to the workplace. In my experience, coordinating the range of comparisons (to ensure a range of unique combinations) and explaining the task to the manager makes this technique impractical.
Job incumbents or managers are interviewed and asked for examples of critical situations that involved the target job. An example could involve the winning of a key account, prevention of a major catastrophe, or major change in a business process. The interviewer explores the incident from multiple vantage points, asking how the job incumbent solved the situation, the skills or experiences that enabled her and what could have been done differently.
Using a predefined competency framework (either generic or specific to the organization), job incumbents or managers are asked to select the core competencies required
