Advantages and Disadvantages of Job Analysis Methods

http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/compensation/classification/jobanalysis/advantages/index.html Method

Advantages Firsthand information. Simple to use. Verifies data from other sources. Useful for manual and psychomotor tasks. Incumbent describes work. Can yield data about cognitive and psychomotor processes difficult to observe. Qualitative data can be examined. Works well for jobs with long job cycles. Analysis is based on concrete behavior. Collects data as events happen.

Observation

Disadvantages Time consuming. May bias worker performance. Small sample size. Requires skilled observer. Validity & reliability may be problematic. Not useful for jobs consisting of mostly mental tasks. Requires experienced interviewer and welldesigned questions. Difficult to combine data from disparate interviews. Data gathered is subjective and should be verified. May elicit extraneous data. Scales require some expertise to develop. Consistent and continuous entries may be difficult to obtain. Data not in standardized format. May not include all important parts of work. May be difficult to construct. May have low response rate. Responses may be incomplete. Responses may be difficult to interpret (openended).

Interview

Critical Incident Diary

Inexpensive.

Checklist

Questionnaire

Easy to administer. Does not require trained interviewer. Relatively less expensive. Can reach more workers. Data is standardized (structured). Data from experience is superior to observation. Data is comprehensive. SME's chosen for expertise and competence.

Technical Conference