Table of Content Page No.
 Introduction 2
 Job Analysis 2
 Nature of Job Analysis 2
 Components of Job Analysis 4
 Uses of Job Analysis 4-5
 Steps in Job Analysis 6-7
 Methods of collecting information 7-11 o Interview o Questionnaire o Observation o Participant diary/logs o Quantitative Job Analysis Technique
 Conclusion 11

Introduction
A method of performing job analyses and delivering or providing access to the results of the job analyses by creating a list of job requirements and working conditions for each discrete task of a job, creating a physical demands analysis comprising a list of physical requirements of each discrete task of a job, and combining the lists into a job analysis database for determining whether a worker can perform a job.

Job Analysis
Job analysis is a systematic approach to defining the job role, description, requirements, responsibilities, evaluation, etc. It helps in finding out required level of education, skills, knowledge, training, etc for the job position. It also depicts the job worth i.e. measurable effectiveness of the job and contribution of job to the organization. Thus, it effectively contributes to setting up the compensation package for the job position.

Nature of Job Analysis:
Organisations consist of positions that have to be staffed. Job Analysis is the procedure through which we determine the task, duties and responsibilities of these positions and the characteristics of the people to hire for the positions. Job analysis produces information used for writing, job description (a list of what the job entails) and job specification (what kind of people to hire for the job). The supervisor or HR specialist normally collects one or more of the following types of information via the job analysis: Work Activities: First, he or she collects information about the job’s actual work activities, such as cleaning, selling, teaching or painting. This list may also include how, why and when the worker performs each activity. Human Behaviour: The specialist may also collect information about human behaviours like sensing, communicating, deciding and writing. Included here would be information regarding job demands such as lifting weights or walking long distances. Machines, tools, equipment & work aids: This category includes information about tools used, materials processed, knowledge dealt with or applied (such as finance or law), & services rendered (such as counselling or repairing). Performance standards: The employer may also want information about the job’s performance standards (in terms of quantity or quality levels for each job duty). Management will use these standards to appraise the employees. Job context: Information included here are about such matters as physical working conditions, work schedule and the organisational and social context – for instance, the number of people with whom the employee would normally interact. Information regarding incentives might also be included here. Human requirements: This includes information regarding the job’s human requirements, such as job-related knowledge or skills (education, training, work experience) and required personal attributes (aptitudes, physical characteristics, personality, interests).

Components of Job analysis:
Job analysis is a systematic procedure to analyze the requirements for the job role and job profile. Job analysis can be further categorized into following sub components.

Job Description:

Job description is an organized factual statement of job contents in the form of duties and responsibilities of a specific job. The preparation of job description is very important before a vacancy is advertised. It tells in brief the nature and type of job. This type of document is descriptive in nature and it constitutes all those facts which are related to a job

Job Specification:

Job specification is a statement which tells us minimum acceptable human qualities which helps to perform a job. Job specification translates the job description into human qualifications so that a job can be performed in a better manner. Job specification helps in hiring an appropriate person for an appropriate position.

Uses of Job Analysis:

Recruitment & Selection: Job Analysis provides information about what the job entails and what human characteristics are required to perform the job. This information, in the form of job description and specifications, helps management decide what sort of people to recruit and hire. Compensation: Job analysis is crucial for estimating the value of each job & its appropriate compensation. Compensation (such as salary and bonus) usually depends upon the job’s required skill and education level, safety hazards, degree of responsibility and so on - all the factors we can assess through job analysis. Performance Appraisal: A performance appraisal compares each employee’s actual performance with his or her performance standards. Managers use job analysis to determine the job’s specific activities and performance standards. Training: The job description should show the activities and skills – and therefore the training - that job requires. Discovering unassigned duties: Job analysis can also help reveal unassigned duties. For example, a company’s production manager says Mr. X is responsible for a dozen or so duties, such as production scheduling and raw material purchasing. However any reference of raw material inventory management was missing. On further study, the manager finds that none of the other manufacturing people are responsible of inventory management. Thus a manger has uncovered an essential unassigned duty with regards to job analysis.

Steps in Job Analysis:
There are six steps in doing a job analysis.
(1) Decide how you’ll use the information, since this will determine the data you collect and how you collect them. Some data collection techniques - like interviewing the employee and asking what the job entails are good for writing job description and selecting employees for the job. Other technique like the position analysis & questionnaire do not provide qualitative information for job description. Instead, they provide numerical ratings for each job; these can be used to compare jobs for compensation purpose.
(2) Review relevant background information such as organisation charts, process charts and job description.
a. Organisation charts show the organisation wide division of work, how the job in question relates to other jobs, and where the job fits in the overall organisation. The chart should show the title of each position and by means of interconnecting lines, who reports to whom and with whom the job incumbent communicates.
b. A process chart provide more detailed picture of the work flow. In its simplest form a process chart shows the flow of inputs to and the outputs from the job you are analysing. Finally, the existing job description, if there is one, usually provides a starting point for building the revised job description. In the figure below the quality control clerk is expected to review components from suppliers, check components going to the plan managers and give information regarding components quality to these managers.
(3) Select representative positions. Why? Because there may be too many similar jobs to analyse. For example, it is usually necessary to analyse the jobs of 200 assembly workers when a sample of 10 jobs will do.
(4) Actually analyse the job – by collecting data on job activities, required employee behaviours, working condition, and human traits & abilities needed to perform the job. For this step, use one or more of the job analysis methods.
(5) Verify the job analysis information with the worker performing the job & with his or her immediate supervisor. This will help confirm that the information is factually correct and complete. This review can also help gain the employees acceptance of the job analysis data and conclusions by giving that person a chance to review and modify your description of the job activities.
(6) Develop a job description and job specification. These are two tangible products og the job analysis. The job description is a written statement that describes the activities and responsibilities of the job, as well as its important features, such as working conditions and safety hazards. The job specification summarises the personal qualities, traits, skill and background required for getting job done. In maybe in a separate document or in the same document as the job description.

Methods of collecting Job Analysis Information:
There are various ways to collect information on the duties, responsibilities and activities of the job. In practice, we can use anyone of them, or we can combine the techniques that best fit our purpose. Thus, an interview might be appropriate for creating a job description, whereas the position analysis questionnaire maybe more appropriate for quantifying the worth of a job for compensation purposes.
Conducting the job analysis usually involves a joint effort by an HR specialist, the worker, & the worker’s supervisor. The HR specialist might observe and analyse the job and then develop a job description and specification. The supervisor and worker may fill out questionnaires listing the subordinate’s activities. The supervisor and worker may then review and verify the job analysed conclusions regarding the job’s activities and duties.
In practice, firm usually collects jobs analysis data from multiple “subject matter experts” using questionnaires and interviews. They then average data from several employees from different departments to determine how much time a typical employee spends on each of several specific tasks. The problem is that employees who have the same job title but work in different departments may experience very different pressures. Therefore, simply adding up and averaging the amount of time that, say, HR assistance need to devote “interviewing candidates” could end in misleading results. The point is that we must understand the job’s departmental context – the way someone with a particular job title spends his or her time is not necessarily the same from department to department.

The Interview
Managers use three types of interview to collect job analysis data – individual interview with each employee, group interview with groups of employees who have the same jobs & the supervisor interviews with one or more supervisor who know the job. They use group interviews when a large number of employees are performing similar or identical work, since it can be a quick and inexpensive way to gather information.
Whichever kind of interviews we use, we need to be sure the interviewee fully understands the reason fro the interview since there is a tendency for such interviews to be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as “efficiency evaluation”. If so, interviewees may hesitate to describe their jobs accurately.
Pros & Cons
The interview is probably the most widely used method for identifying the job’s duties & responsibilities and its wide use reflects its advantages. It is a relatively simple and quick way to collect information, including information that might never appear on a written form. The interview also provides an opportunity to explain the need for and function of the job analysis. And the employee can vent frustration that might otherwise go unnoticed by the management.
Distortion of the information is the main problem – whether due to outright falsification or honest misunderstanding. Job analysis is often a prelude to changing a job’s pay rate. Employees therefore may legitimately view the interview as the efficiency evaluation that may affect their pay. They may then tend to exaggerate certain responsibilities while minimising others.
Typical Questions
 What is the job being performed?
 What are the major duties of your position? What exactly do you do?
 What physical location do you work in?
 What are the education, experience, skill and (where applicable) certification and licensing requirements?
 In what activities do you participate?
 What are the job responsibilities and duties?
 What are the basic accountabilities or performance that typifies your work?
 What are your responsibilities? What is the environmental and working condition involved?
 What are the jobs physical demands? The emotional and mental demands?
 What are the health and safety condition?
 Are you exposed to any hazards or any unusual working conditions?

Interview Guidelines
There are several things which should be kept in mind while conducting a job analysis interview.
1. The job analyst and supervisor should work together to identify the workers who know the job best.
2. Quickly establish rapport with the interviewee. Know the persons name, speak in easily understood language, briefly review the interview purpose and explain how the person was chosen for the interview.
3. Follow a structured guide or checklist. One that lists questions and provides space for answers. This ensures you to identify crucial question ahead of time and that all the interviewers (if there are more than one) cover all the questions.
4. When duties are not performed in a regular manner – for instance when the worker doesn’t performs the same job over and over again many times a day- ask the worker to list his/her duties in order of importance and frequency of occurrence. This will ensure that you don’t overlook crucial but infrequently performed activities.
5. Finally, after completing the interview, review and verify the data. Specifically review the information with the worker’s immediate supervisor and the interviewee.

Questionnaires
Having employees fill out questionnaires to describe their job-related duties & responsibilities is another good way to obtain job analysis information.
We have to decide how structured the questionnaire should be and what question to include. Some questionnaires are very structured checklists. Each employee gets an inventory of perhaps hundreds of specific duties or tasks (such as “change and splice via”). He or she is asked to indicate whether or not he/she performs each tasks and, it so, how much time is normally spent on each. At the other extreme, the questionnaire can be open-ended and simply ask the employee to “describe the major duties of your job.” In practice, the best questionnaire often falls between these two extremes.
Whether structured or unstructured, questionnaires have both pros & cons. A questionnaire is a quick and efficient way to obtain information from a large number of employees, its less costly than interviewing hundreds of workers, for instance. However, developing any questionnaire an testing it can be expensive and time-consuming.

Observation
Direct observation is specially useful when jobs consist mainly of observable physical activities – assembly – line worker and accounting clerk are examples. On the other hand, observation is usually not appropriate when the job entails a lot of mental activities (lawyer, design–engineer). Nor it is useful if the employee only occasionally engages in important activities, such as a nurse who handles emergencies. And reactivity – the workers changing what he or she normally does because you are watching – can also be a problem. Manager often use direct observation and interviewing together. One approach is to observe the worker on the job during a complete work cycle. Here you take notes of all job activities. Then after accumulating as much information as possible, you interview the worker. Ask the person to clarify points not understood and to explain what are the activities he or she performs that you didn’t observe.

Participant Diary/Logs
Another approach is to ask workers to keep a diary/log of what they do during the day. For every activity he or she engages in, the employee records the activity in a log. This can produce a very complete picture of the job, specially when supplemented with subsequent interviews with the worker and the supervisor. The employee, of course, might try to exaggerate some activities and underplay others. However, the detailed, chronological nature of the log tends to mediate against this.
Some firms take a hi-tech approach to diary/logs. They give employees pocket dictating machines and pagers. Then at random times during the day, they page the workers, who dictate what they are doing at that time. This approach can avoid one pitfall of the traditional diary/log method: relying on workers to remember what they did hours earlier when they complete their logs at the end of the day.

Quantitative Job Analysis Techniques
Qualitative approaches like interviews and questionnaires are not always suitable. For example, if your aim is to compare jobs for pay purposes, you may want to be able to assign quantitative values to each job. The position analysis questionnaire, the Department of Labour approach and functional job analysis are three popular quantitative methods.

Conclusion
From Job Analysis, specific details of what is being done and the skills utilized in the job are obtained. Job Analysis enables the managers to understand jobs and job structures to improve work flow or develop techniques to improve productivity.