notes for jd book

TeleCom Clinic's Definitive Guide to Job Descriptions
www.GuideToJobDescriptions.com

About This Site:

The Definitive Guide to Job Descriptions was developed by the staff of the TeleCom Clinic and compiled from thousands of job descriptions collected from organizations all across the United States. TeleCom Clinic has been in business since 1991 and is known as a technology research and consulting firm with an extensive publications list in such publications such as Bottom Line.

We have not attempted to sanitize the job descriptions. Although we have simplify many of the different formats that we worked with. For the most part, the job descriptions are reproduced as they were submitted as part of our original survey. This as-is reproduction was intentionally done to keep the flavor and diversity of the jobs and titles that exist for different types of organizations. In those cases where the reviewed job descriptions did not make sense for our format, we made the changes necessary to allow for a better fit.

Sometimes, the job descriptions were highly equipment or software specific. When this occurred, we modified the technical terms used to be more generic. Almost every job description reviewed used the businesses name or industry type, i.e., banking, petrochemicals somewhere in the document. Since we are not disclosing the names of organizations that participated in the survey, we have substituted the company name with generic titles such as "Organization" or "Company." When you use these job descriptions, you can easily substitute your organizations name or industry type where appropriate.

The job descriptions can always be edited to add the technical specifications required for your organization. Some organizations listed the equipment currently used while others did not.

Positions often require specific knowledge in areas like: TCP/IP, Windows, Linux, Solaris, OSI, Netview, SNA/SDLC, T1, T3, D1, D3, CICS, UNIX, C, DOS/Novell Netware, 3Com, Banyan Vines, Ethernet, SL1, Meridian, System 85 . . .. This technical list is almost endless. Again, these specific areas of knowledge can be added as necessary.

Because of the different job description formats reviewed, some we used did not have all job description categories available. In the cases where we felt the body of the job description was useful, we filled in the balance of the information to fit our model. This was often the case for the Supervision Received and Supervision Exercised categories.

Where appropriate, we include what we consider to be job families. We believe the development of proper job families is important to any organizations job description development strategy. We point out in the Appendix, that providing job growth and movement is vital to keeping and maintaining a balanced and motivated work force.

About the Job Descriptions:

While researching the original manual, we found an endless variety of formats used to display job descriptions. These ranged from complex pre-printed forms to simple hand written listings. To bring order to the data, the job description format used is purposely kept simple. The headings used in this manual and what they represent are in the Generic Job Description Form.

Why This Book Was Written:

The author, Neil S. Sachnoff, had responsibility for a large telecommunications operation at a major east coast University. During the latter part of the 1980’s a completely new telecommunications system was designed, bid and installed. This new system required a complete reorganization of the Telecommunications and Computer Center Operations Departments. The new telecommunication system and the reorganization resulted in the need to evaluate and rewrite over 40 new technical job descriptions. This was required too properly run and operate the new telecommunications department and operate the new system. The reorganization of the department and rewriting of these job descriptions took several months, research and many discussions with the Human Resources Department.

There was no real place for the author to go to find telecommunications job descriptions to use as a basis for the start of this project. After discussions with dozens of information technology professionals it became obvious that such a text, especially on a web site, would be of great help to the industry.

This first version of The Definitive Guide to Job Descriptions in 1995 was in response to this need. The author welcomes written correspondence concerning this web site. Any comments or additional job descriptions can be forwarded to TeleCom Clinic, Attn: Neil S. Sachnoff, 4402 Stonehedge Road, Edison, NJ 08820 or email to TeleComClinic@aol.com.