Pushing The Pay Envelope: Y2k Compensation Strategies - http://www.sla.org/professional/competency.html

Information Outlook, Oct, 1999 by Stephen Abram

Use confident language (e.g., "the incumbent will" not "the incumbent should"). Most library position descriptions I've read have this subtle land mine in them. Action-oriented descriptions convey higher value. It also subtly attacks that pathetically dated but still powerful librarian stereotype.

Use the present tense. Important jobs do things (not will do or did). You lose a sense of urgency in accomplishing the position's goals through simple poor use of tense. It's subtle but, in the end, gives power to your writing.

Don't allow the printed position description document to represent you. A job description is a surrogate for you. Create opportunities to build understanding of your job and role by having conversations with key people who can have an impact on your success. Identify leaders, decision-makers, unit heads, strategists, members of the job evaluation committee and build relationships with them through personal contact. Talk to the leader--whether your organization calls them president, dean, deputy minister, whatever. It's easier to get influence to flow down than to push it up the organization.

Job Evaluation Systems

There are a number of varieties of job evaluation systems. Most large organizations have adopted at least one system to appraise the value and relationship of a position (not person) to their organization in relation to other jobs in the same organization. In fact, in a number of jurisdictions, companies are required to do this by law to meet pay equity and employment equity legislation.

There are two primary types of job evaluation systems: qualitative and quantitative. Examples of qualitative systems are "classification" or "ranking" systems. Examples of quantitative systems are those that use either the factor comparison method or the point-factor method. They may have names like the Hay Plan or Hay System, the Paterson method, the Decision Band Method, the SUNY plan, the Phoenix plan, the Aiken plan, or many, many more. These systems range from being very simple to understand and administer to being very complicated with any number of sophisticated options and benefits. The company HR department generally administers these, often, but not always, in consultation with a consulting firm. The consulting firm provides advice, training, independent salary surveys, compensation audits and correlation of the jobs to industry norms, and other compensation or salary administration-related services, often among other consulting or actuarial services.

In general, it is important to understand the method by which your company assigns a point value to your job. It's important to remember a somewhat difficult distinction--the points assigned to your position, while abstractly defining the position's worth to the organization, are NOT supposed to be based on the current incumbent's value or performance. Although very difficult, I recommend you make a real effort to divorce yourself from taking any personal sense of worth from this process or measurement. The evaluation is supposed to focus on the value of the position to the organization. It may be that what is valued is merely a well-organized collection of materials devoid of reference services and this can be a clear organizational choice. Then again, it can happen through sheer neglect, incremental changes over time, or lack of assertive or proactive communication that the library positions have clearly outgrown their rankings/ratings.