Classification Descriptions: Definition of Terms
Elements of the Classification Framework
Classification System: A framework organizations use to arrange jobs into groups based on similarities of purpose, required skills, duties performed, accountability, work environment and other common factors.
Career Family: A broad meaningful grouping of jobs commonly clustered within a career emphasis. Content of defined work within a job is key criteria in determining relationship to this familial structure.
Career Band: A sub-set of jobs commonly found in the market with a recognized discipline specialty and grouped within the larger context of a Career Family
Job Role: A broad category corresponding to the primary purpose of a job and its relationship to other jobs. All jobs in a given Job Role share a common set of expectations for key behaviors that support good stewardship of the organization's resources. There will be three job roles: professional, managerial, and executive leadership. In the new strucutre, the professional job role will include the staff in our current P/A, office, technical, and allied health job families.
Organizational Competencies: Skills, Knowledge, Abilities, and Behaviors that support effective stewardship of the University of Michigan’s mission, vision, values, and resources.
Market Reference Job Title : Job title, content and associated market compensation related to classifications in the external employment market.
Working Title: A customized, descriptive title that provides greater understanding of the individual employee’s responsibilities and scope within the assigned market job title organized with in an assigned Career Family, Career Band, and Job Role. Often Working Title is based on current industry/profession standards.
Other Related Terms
Market: The area from which applicants are to be recruited. The combination of Career Family, Career Band, and Job Role and market reference job title provides a link to labor market.
Market-Reference Point: Compensation philosophy in which an organization chooses to benchmark to a percentile of the market in order to compensate classifications within the organization.
Job Title: Label used to describe a set of specific activities, responsibilities, duties and tasks.
Benchmark Job: A representative University of Michigan job used for pay comparisons that is commonly found in external organizations, e.g., Accountant. Also describes a job that is similar or comparable in content across businesses in an organization.
Career
Career Development: An ongoing and formalized effort that focuses on developing enriched and more capable workers.
Career Path: Possible directions and career opportunities available in an organization; presenting the steps in a possible career and plausible approaches to accomplishing them; lines of advancement in an occupational field within an organization.
Jobs
Organizational Competencies: Integrated knowledge sets within an organization that distinguishes it from its competitors and deliver value to customers.
Job Analysis: The systematic process of collecting information used to make decisions about jobs. Job analysis identifies the tasks, duties, and responsibilities of a particular job.
Position Description: A written document that identifies, describes, and defines a job in terms of its duties, responsibilities, working conditions, and specifications.
Job Design: The process of organizing work into the tasks required to perform a specific job.
Job Evaluation: Systematic process of determining the relative worth of jobs in order to establish which jobs should be paid more than others within an organization.
Job Slotting: Review and evaluation of a job, its duties and its tasks against other similar/like positions already in place in an organization in an effort to appropriately position the job in the proper Career Family, Career Band, Job Role, and market referenced job title.
Wage and Salary Survey: Survey of wages paid to employees of other employers in the surveying organization’s relevant labor market.
Employees
Individual Equity: The perceived fairness of individual pay decisions.
Benchmarking: Process of measuring one’s own services and practices against recognized leaders in order to identify areas for improvement.
Comparable Worth: A pay concept or policy that calls for comparable pay for jobs that require comparable skills, effort and responsibility and have comparable working conditions, even if the job content is different.
Decentralization: Transferring responsibility and decision-making authority from a central office to people and locations closer to the situation that demands attention.
Internal Equity: The perceived fairness of the pay structure within a unit.