Methodology for Identifying Abilities for Job Classification: An Application of Job Analysis

There has been a resurgence of interest in using cognitive and personality factors to improve prediction of job performance. Small gains in prediction efficiency can have enormous benefits for organizations that make many employee placements. It is prohibitively expensive to conduct empirical validity studies for every newly proposed factor for every job. A cost-effective alternative is the method of expert judgments in which subject matter experts (SMEs) rate the importance of various abilities for task components. This rational specification technique was applied to four Air Force enlisted and four officer occupations using the survey mail-out method to obtain SME ratings of the importance of various abilities for successful job performance. Tasks (e.g., calculate serial dilutions, evacuate refrigerant subsystems) were grouped by verbs to define activity modules. Reliable and reasonable ratings of the importance of abilities were obtained by the survey mail-out method.