Discussion 2

New members - Information - Questions - Quotes
 
Happy New Year, job analysts! I hope everyone had a relaxing, stress-free holiday season. If you did, please call me and tell me how you did it.
 
New members: Diane Instness (Diane_Instness@dot.ca.gov) joins us from CalTrans, replacing Janice Dias, and Regena Caton (RCaton@dmhhq.state.ca.us) joins us from the Department of Mental Health. Welcome to both of you! Please feel free to pose questions and lend us your wisdom.
 
Information: I have two websites to share with everyone. The first is a book from the National Academy of Sciences entitled "The Changing Nature of Work: Implications for Occupational Analysis". The full text is available at http://www.nap.edu/html/occup_analysis/index.html This book contains a good description of many of the changes we are dealing with today as human resource professionals and is guaranteed to provoke thought.
 
The second website is that of the Buros Institute, which publishes their test reviews online at http://frontier-s.unl.edu/BUROS/trolpage1a.html. Most of these reviews are available at the larger libraries, but are available here for $15 a piece. I have found these reviews to be very helpful when examining off-the-shelf tests.
 
Questions: In response to my last e-mail, Julie Carrasco-Minton (Water Resources) raised an interesting point. When SMEs bring up specific tasks or KSAs that don't fit with all positions, don't simply abandon them after computing their overall rating--retain them for possible use in the hiring interview stage.
 
Julie also raised an interesting question: What do you do when KSAs identified in the job analysis aren't in the class specification? Can we test for them? I'm going to throw that one out there for discussion.
 
Quotes: I leave you with two quotes today.
 
"One need not use ALL the wealth of detail a complex job analysis can provide. Overall performance in any job, or any aspect of job behavior, can be optimally be predicted by only a few predictors. After one or two variables--at most four or five--future variables rarely make more than trivial contributions to predictive accuracy." (Guion, 1998)
 
"...the fear of possible litigation may lead organizations to use selection devices that are incorrectly perceived to be legally safer, rather than valid predictive selection devices that may be better, but are incorrectly perceived as legally risky...organizations that do not use the best selection devices available may not survive." (Terpstra & Kethley, 2002)
 
Relax--the week is more than half over!
 
Bryan Baldwin

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Another job analysis quote:

(You never know what sort of SME responses you'll get...)

"Let me tell you what happens if we don't do our job. If we don't clean out the sewers of stuff like three limbs, rusted hubcaps, and old tires, the sewers get clogged up. If they clogged up, the sewage won't flow, if the sewage won't flow, it backs up, people will have sewage backed up into the basements of their homes. Manhole covers will pop open, flooding the streets with sewage. Sewage will eventually cover the highways, airport runways, and train tracks. People will be trapped in their home by sewage. The entire city will be covered with sewage. Nobody will be able to get in or out of the city. That is what happens if we don't do our job of cleaning the sewage" (from Muchinsky, 1997).