Job Evaluations

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Approaches to Classifying Employees in Government

There are two basic approaches to developing a job evaluation classification system. These two basic approaches are the market data approach and the job content approach. Neither of these approaches are stand alone approaches, and in fact, each requires information from the other approach. The distinguishing characteristic between these two job evaluation approaches is the relative emphasis which is placed on either the market data or the job content data.

The market data approach is characterized by brief job descriptions, use of market data on over 50% of the job titles to determine the pay grades of jobs and an informal slotting approach to determine the salary grade for job titles where there is a lack of sufficient market data. In the last ten years, this approach has become increasingly popular among companies in the private sector, because of its flexibility and simplicity. We are not aware any, government sector organizations which use this approach. We believe the reasons are that the government sector needs solid, detailed job descriptive information in order to develop selection criteria, as well as to document classification decisions.

Basically, the job content approach is characterized by detailed job descriptions, extensive job evaluation data and an analysis of the value or worth of the content of the job. Market data is used to determine the general level of the market for occupations, but the relative emphasis is on the internal relationships that are developed from the job evaluations.

The job content approach relies on the evaluation of the worth or value of the job title based on a determination of the different levels of the skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions required of the job. These four criteria form the basis of most job content evaluation systems because they are embodied in the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Moreover, they have been determined to be a sound basis for distinguishing the different levels of work that exist. In other words, these four criteria form the basis for most existing job evaluation systems that are used to determine the value of jobs.

Within the job content approach, there are six basic types of job content evaluation methods. These can be categorized into two different types: non-quantitative methods and quantitative methods..

There are three basic non-quantitative methods to evaluate the job content of jobs. There are called non-quantitative methods because the methods do not result in a quantitative number that can be manipulated by normal mathematical operations of adding, subtracting, multiplication or division. These are:

• whole job ranking
• classification
• slotting

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