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MODEL OF

EVALUATION SYSTEM AND PAY STRUCTURE

for

CLERICAL, OFFICE MACHINE OPERATION, AND TECHNICIAN POSITIONS

developed by

Job Evaluation and Pay Review Task Force
U.S. CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION
Washington, D. C. 20415

[blocks in formation]

for

CLERICAL, OFFICE MACHINE OPERATION, AND TECHNICIAN POSITIONS

As part of its overall project to develop a comprehensive, coordinated job evaluation plan for Federal civilian employees, the Job Evaluation and Pay Review Task Force undertook a study of lower level white-collar positions, including clerical, office machine operation, and technician occupations.

The clerical, office machine operation, and technician group (hereafter abbreviated COMOT) is composed of approximately 525,000 nonsupervisory positions currently allocated to one of 57 clerical, 34 technician and 13 office machine operation class series in the General Schedule. It represents a variety of jobs all of which, however, have somewhat similar types of career patterns and are treated much alike in private industry for pay and career management purposes. These are the jobs in the Federal Government that possess the same characteristics as those classified as nonexempt* status employees in private industry--i.e., production-oriented clerical, technician and operational jobs requiring nonprofessional qualifications.

Supervisors and managers over COMOT positions are evaluated under the Supervisor and
Manager Evaluation System (SAMES).

Need for a New Approach

The Task Force discovered a number of inadequacies in the position classification system as applied to this group of positions which, in the opinion of the Task Force, cannot be adequately corrected by simply modifying the present system. Some of these problems are:

--The current occupational grade alignment within this category does not permit
reasonable comparability with private industry in setting pay rates for many
of the occupations.

--There are more grade levels used in the General Schedule for some individual
occupations than there are clearly identifiable levels of work.

--The present classification standards have weaknesses; i.e., some standards are
written in terms too general to be specifically applicable, some do not define
the full range of either levels or kinds of work in a given series adequately,
and some standards appear to define artificial levels.

The Task Force conclusions thus confirm the finding of the House Subcommittee Position Classification Report that the present General Schedule system is too complex and requires more time and effort than is available to adequately maintain it.

Practices of Other Employers Explored

With the deficiencies of the present system in mind, the Task Force investigated various systems now in use in the Federal Government--i.e., Atomic Energy Commission, National Security Agency, etc.--and those used by the more progressive State governments and major private employers to determine what methodology of job evaluation would best fit the current needs of the Federal service. The factor ranking method was found to utilize techniques which overcome the deficiencies of the present classification system. Factor ranking is essentially a technique of comparing the job to be evaluated with all others,

* That is, nonexempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

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