Real-Life Decision Making
A job analyst makes a lot of decisions when coming up with the best way
to pin down a job. Based on the input they gather from employees through surveys
and interviews, analysts decide what the information means and how to apply
it.
"It's all decision making," says analyst Jimmy Mitchell.
"Job analysis is there so that somebody in an organization can improve
the way they make decisions. There's a lot of critical decision making
that goes on in terms of building the surveys and collecting the data, making
decisions about selections, organizational structure, placement, performance
appraisal, training, it's all across the board."
Perhaps the most critical demand for an analyst's judgment call comes
when jobs are classified into groups for salary, training and organizational
purposes. Analyst Johnny Weismuller says an analyst has to cluster jobs with
accuracy and good sense.
"The hardest decision-making skills have to do with deciding when two different
job descriptions are different enough to warrant splitting them apart, or
similar enough to put them together," says Weismuller.
"It's called job typing," he says. "It's the same idea of classification
as for the purposes of defining coins: can you put a quarter and a penny together?
But can you put a quarter and a dollar bill together? No. It's like the
lessons you learned in kindergarten -- which one doesn't fit?"
The consequences of classifying jobs poorly can cost an organization double
what it should. If the same job category is split into two descriptions, the
company has to run two different training curricula, classrooms, instructors
and promotion tests.
Job analysts try to overlap where they can. But they don't want to
lose too much of either job's essence. Consequences of too much overlap
can affect the way people find the information they need from official job
classification sources like the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC).
The SOC gives each job category a code. If two different jobs are coded
as one, listed as having the same education and skill requirements, someone
interested in a specific job could be sent down the wrong career planning
path.
You're a job analyst working for a government index like SOC. You
are presented with two jobs: physicist, which requires at least an undergraduate
degree in science, if not a PhD; and electronics technician, which is an area
of applied physics that can be studied in community college.
What do you do?