03 Terms to Remember
Abilities: Stable capacities for learning and performing various behaviors that underlie skill development and job performance.
Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA): Specialized methods that focus on the cognitive skills, knowledge structures, and decision-making processes that distinguish expert from novice performance.
Common Metric Questionnaire (CMQ): A worker-oriented instrument with over 2,000 items designed to address limitations of the PAQ through more behaviorally specific language.
Compensable factors: Elements like skill requirements, effort demands, responsibility levels, and working conditions used to determine relative job worth for compensation purposes.
Competency models: Sophisticated approach to describing job requirements by combining behavioral indicators with underlying KSAOs for integration across HR systems.
Critical Incident Technique: Method that asks Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to identify specific examples of behavior or performance that led to successful or unsuccessful outcomes.
Elements: The smallest unit of work activity that can be meaningfully analyzed, serving as building blocks for tasks.
Functional Job Analysis (FJA): A task-oriented approach that systematically evaluates tasks along data, people, and things dimensions using standardized rating scales.
Hybrid approaches: Job analysis methods that gather information about both work activities (tasks) and worker requirements (KSAOs) simultaneously.
Job analysis: The systematic process of identifying the content of a job in terms of activities performed and attributes required for performance.
Job description: Written statements about what job holders do, how they do it, and why they do it, serving multiple organizational purposes.
Job design: Process of analyzing and organizing work tasks to improve efficiency, safety, employee satisfaction, or other important outcomes.
Job Element Method (JEM): A worker-oriented approach focusing on identifying KSAOs that distinguish superior from average performers.
Job evaluation: Systematic process using job analysis information to determine the relative worth of different positions for compensation purposes.
Job specifications: Documents that delineate the KSAOs necessary for effective job performance, focusing on human requirements rather than work activities.
Jobs: Collections of positions that are similar enough to share a common job title and general requirements across organizations.
Knowledge: Information, facts, and understanding that individuals must possess to perform job tasks effectively.
Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other characteristics (KSAOs): The comprehensive set of human attributes required for successful job performance.
O*NET (Occupational Information Network): Comprehensive hybrid approach providing standardized occupational information that replaced the Dictionary of Occupational Titles.
Other characteristics: Job-relevant attributes including personality traits, interests, physical characteristics, and experiences that influence performance.
Point system: Job evaluation approach that assigns points to jobs based on the degree to which they require various compensable factors.
Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ): Standardized worker-oriented instrument containing 187 items for describing work in terms of human requirements.
Positions: Individual combinations of tasks performed by specific people within organizations, representing unique work arrangements.
Reliability: The consistency of job analysis results across different analysts, incumbents, time periods, or measurement occasions.
Skills: Practiced capabilities for performing specific actions that develop through experience and training.
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): Individuals who are incumbents or experts regarding the target job, providing essential input for job analysis processes.
Task inventory method: Task-oriented approach that generates comprehensive, standardized lists of task statements for systematic evaluation.
Tasks: Meaningful units of work that encompass multiple elements and are performed to achieve specific objectives or outcomes.
Utility: The practical value of job analysis information for organizational decision-making, encompassing cost-effectiveness and feasibility.
Validity: The accuracy of job analysis in representing actual job requirements and predicting important outcomes like job performance.