Survey Shows Employee Views of Job Analysis Project

THE ACADEMIC Professional Advisory Committee (APAC) has released the results of its survey concerning employee experiences related to the Job Analysis (JA) Project.

THE JA Project has been going on at UIC for approximately five years. In the JA, all Academic Professionals’ (AP) jobs are being analyzed by UIC to see if they should be classified as AP or Civil Service. The JA was mandated by the State Universities Civil Service System (SUCSS), which charged that too many jobs at State universities were being classified as JA when they should be Civil Service (CS).

INTERIM VICE CHANCELLOR for Academic Affairs and Provost Eric Gislason and Chancellor Michael Amiridis supported the survey, which was conducted in April. At that time, APAC worked with the UIC Survey Research Laboratory to send an online survey link to every AP, CS, and faculty employee at UIC. A total of 1,362 individuals completed the survey. The Final Analytical Report has been posted online at https://sites.google.com/site/uicapac/documents/survey .

AP EMPLOYEES and convertees were queried about the JA procedures they had undergone, the length of time that had elapsed since participation in JA, the outcome and methods of notification, and the conversion process, seniority determination, new title, and appeals.

SURVEY RESULTS showed that over the course of the JA project:

*More than five methodologies were employed to review AP jobs, with a large number of respondents reporting having undergone either no or multiple reviews;

*For positions slated to be, or already, converted, decisions were rendered with little consistency or transparency.

IN ADDITION:

*More than 50% of respondents cited poor to no communication from Human Resources (HR) regarding process, timeline, notifications, and/or appeal rights;

*Just two months before the planned close of the JA project, almost 57% of APs who had been reviewed had not been notified of their outcome;

*During the last year, the JA Project began to rely more heavily on an online survey, which captured information on only a limited number of employees’ major duties.

EMPLOYEES AND supervisors submitted hundreds of comments and concerns about the JA process.

“THE SURVEY results are compelling and highlight numerous concerns, many of them pertaining to the Job Analysis methodology, quality and/or timeliness of communications from Human Resources to either the campus community or individuals whose positions were reviewed, and the appropriateness of the recommended CS classifications,” APAC wrote in an open letter to survey respondents and the UIC community.

“IN RECENT weeks, APAC has opened regular communications and discussed possible action items and policy recommendations with UIC’s new HR leadership team of Mark Donovan and Michael Ginsburg,” the APAC letter continued. “We look forward to continuing to partner with the campus to understand the immediate and downstream consequences of Job Analysis and suggest productive solutions.”