Academic Job Codes

The Data Governance Council recently endorsed a new framework for creating and assigning academic job codes.

The current job codes used for assigning individuals to academic positions are currently not optimized to support data governance: data creation, processing, compliance, reporting, and analysis. A workgroup recently completed work to improve efficiency in this critical area.

The project was undertaken as part of ongoing data governance work to contribute to a common data culture by clearly outlining the meaning and uses of academic job codes. The group listened carefully to the stakeholders (faculty, faculty affairs officers, human resources, institutional research, and others) and make sure to take into account their needs. The project also looked to enable accurate analytics and reporting. Change can be uncomfortable, but these changes are necessary and worthwhile to meet the goals and standards of the University.

The primary goal is to create uniform and consistent job codes for faculty and related academic positions. The hope is that doing so will improve reporting and compliance. The key for this project is to define and describe positions, not people. Functional titles may be more appropriately to describe people and were not addressed in this project. While the number of job codes will change, a reduction in the number of job codes was not an explicit goal of this project.

The primary outcome was a data model framework where each position, and therefore the job code used to identify it, can be uniquely defined by setting values for the following attributes:
• Tenure Eligible: an indicator that the position is or is not eligible for promotion to tenure
• Teaching: work related to teaching, tutoring, instructing or lecturing in the activity of imparting knowledge.
• Research: activities related to research, scholarship and institutional scholarship
• Service: activities that contributes to a department, school, University, profession, and community.
• Specialty: an indicator that describes a requirement of an academic job beyond teaching, research and service. Examples include artistic performance, clinical practice, and patient care.
• Maximum Credential Required: an indicator that a terminal degree is a necessary to differentiate for a position. The default value is yes.
• Level: a hierarchical indicator (entry, specialist, assistant, associate, full) described by experience, education, skills, duties/tasks, and supervision given/received.

Now that the framework has been endorsed, it is time to address the details of how to make it work. In summer 2019, there will be continued communication regarding upcoming changes, ongoing work to map current positions to the new job codes model, and a project to create new job code selector (web application) to facilitate correct job code selection.

This work in being done in conjunction with ongoing work to bring additional personnel forms online and the new framework will be integrated into that development work.

The new job codes are now available and have been implemented across the University. If you have questions, Maggie Graham will be happy to answer them.