Insider Info

Travis McCavour has his work cut out for him as a human resources classification advisor, or job analyst. Each time he sits down with someone to talk about a job, he has to fill out a 12-page template describing their work from every angle.

"Each job description I write has 16 sections, from responsibilities to risks and working environment," says McCavour. "So you develop your questions based on the need to get all the information in what we call the standard -- a set of criteria we use to evaluate all jobs here. And there's a lot."

Although it's a lot to cover, McCavour says talking to employees is crucial to job analysis.

"I think it's very important to have the employees themselves talk about the jobs because they know it best," he says. "They know if there's a problem or if an old job description doesn't reflect properly what they're doing. Jobs change all the time -- their duties and responsibilities change.

"Talking to the employees is also my favorite part of the work," adds McCavour. "I work in correctional services, so you're talking to people working in institutions. That's an interesting work environment -- they've got a lot of different pressures and experiences that the rest of us don't have."

But McCavour admits that getting 12 pages of information out of an employee can sometimes be like pulling teeth.

"The hardest part is probably getting people to think about their jobs in a way you can write about," he says. "Sometimes it's hard for people to sit down and think, what do I do? What are my main responsibilities? What pressures do I face in terms of working environment? People don't think about their jobs in that way."

Jay Tartell has a lot to wrap his brain around, too. He heads the U.S. Air Force's occupational analysis program. With 85 staff members, he says the office is probably the largest group of job and occupational analysts anywhere. He adds that it's not surprising, considering the size of the force.

"We're talking about a huge organization. The air force has about 200,000 enlisted people in roughly 300 occupations," says Tartell.

"We have to make sure that our people are trained with some level of efficiency. And the only way we can control that efficiency is by first knowing what are the jobs, what are the tasks that make up the jobs, how do jobs go together to make up occupational fields, and how do occupational fields go together to make up the whole air force."

Tartell says although the size and complexity of the information is a lot to grapple with, he loves the work.

"I enjoy how every occupational analysis project is a whole new study," he says. "You get to meet new people, look at new jobs. If you're an occupational analyst for any period of time, you will know more about the world of work than anybody, anywhere. I've investigated almost every occupation in the air force, from pharmacists to people who jump out of airplanes.

"But it has its challenges, too," he adds. "It's difficult to find people who are interested in doing this kind of work. It's difficult to...get the proper funding to do good work."

In speaking of his life's work, Jimmy Mitchell agrees job analysis doesn't get the respect and interest it deserves. "It's an area very few other people are interested in because it's detailed and many people think mundane," he says. He is the founding director of the nonprofit Institute for Job and Occupational Analysis (IJOA).

"Almost any type of personnel function has to start with a good job analysis," he says. "But it's the thing companies do least well. Everyone tries to skimp on it, because they don't want to invest the time and energy and money to do it right.

"Who would go to the trouble to actually do that detailed analysis of all their jobs?" Mitchell continues. "They should, for their own efficiency, but few bother to invest up front and keep it up. You have to hold companies to it, by making it part of the law."

Mitchell says the expertise of job and occupational analysts is called on by almost every legal debate involving human resources issues and conflicts. These include equal pay for equal work, proving the relevance of a required college degree, or other forms of alleged discrimination in hiring.

"Take the American Disabilities Act for example," he says. "The government is saying OK companies, if you refuse a disabled person the right to be hired based on the fact that they can't do the job, then you've got to be able to demonstrate in court why you couldn't redesign that job a little bit so that person could do the job. The burden of proof is on the company to prove someone can't do the job in a wheelchair. They hire a job analyst to do that."

Clara Hamory is senior occupational researcher for a federal government agency. She works on the National Occupational Classification (NOC) -- an official database of all the jobs in the country's workforce.

"It's a system that is the basis for the collection and interpretation of labor market statistical information," explains Hamory. "It covers all the occupations in the...economy and organizes that world of work.

"In order to be able to study that large world meaningfully, you've got to be able to have some kind of structure that it falls into that addresses things like the type of work that's performed, skill type and skill levels associated with the performance of work. And that's what the NOC does."

This national source of job analysis is compiled and regularly updated by census takers. Hamory says it serves employers, students, the public, and governments.

"Without it, you wouldn't have any kind of trend information related to occupations," she says. "People who wanted to know what kind of requirements are necessary in order to perform work wouldn't have that information available. You wouldn't know how many people are employed in one occupational area versus another.

"The world of work is a really big place," adds Hamory. "It's nice to know we've got a handle on it so we can look at it a certain way and have some kind of understanding of it. And that with that system in place, hopefully the average person can begin to understand how the world of work is made up, and what they want to know about it will be easier to find."