Job Analysis for a Health

¶ … job analysis for a health care organization. Some of the positions there include occupational therapists, physical therapists, masseuses, art therapists, and administrative personnel.

Which approach, task-based job analysis and competency-based job analysis, would you use? Be sure to tell the advantages and disadvantages of the two kinds of analysis and justify your conclusions.

Ideally, a human resource professional should be able to deploy two different types of job analysis when determining the most appropriate personnel to fill certain roles in a healthcare organization. A task-based job analysis may be deemed most appropriate for lower-level or entry level employment functions that require certain basic skills or tasks of employees. An administrative assistant with a wonderful rapport with people and a great character will be of little use to patients if he or she cannot use the necessary word processing software demanded by the job.

For personnel who must deal with the patients, and the public on a regular basis, however, a different approach on the part of the human resource department of the organization is required. Of course, to be considered for their respective positions, prospective occupational therapists, physical therapists, therapeutic masseuses, and art therapists must possess the necessary certification under the law to be considered qualified. But what makes one art therapist better than another art therapist cannot be reduced to possessing a degree and certification alone, or even a proven track record at previous institutions. Therapy is more than a series of rote tasks. The individual must 'fit' the specific organization, and be able to deal with the type of patients the facility most commonly treats. Someone who has great skill working with autistic children might not possess the same finesse working with adults.

Likewise, physical and occupational therapists must possess the necessary qualifications. But their previous experience in various subfields must be taken into consideration, as well as their ability to deal with the demographic of their patients and the hospital as a whole. Working with injured athletes may be difficult for someone more used to working with the elderly, and working in a large, urban hospital is different than working in a smaller and more intimate environment within a general practitioner's office.

A competency job analysis focuses on the competency as a whole by breaking down a task into specific necessary areas needed to fulfill the position. A competency is broken down into a series of tasks "which share some general knowledge and skill," and if the candidate can only perform some of tasks he or she does not possess the competency (What is Competency Mapping and How Can it Help? 2001, What is JA?). For example, an art therapist who should be able to work with children and the elderly would not be rated as competent if he or she did not have the experience or the necessary coursework to do so, even if he or she was a certified therapist.

The degree to which certain competencies were necessary for the health care facility, of course, would be open to debate before opening up the candidate search, but once the core competencies had been set, this would be used to narrow down the field of candidates. For higher-level occupations that have a series of components and facets, a competency-based analysis is more useful. For example, to ensure that the individual had rapport with patients served by the facility, one of the competencies might be defined as working in a hospital environment in a major urban location. While "competencies include knowledge, skills, and abilities, they "are more than that. There is a component of behavior, performance outcomes, motivation, and attitude included in the concept" (Senior Professional in Human Resources Exam Prep: Workforce Planning and Employment, 2007, Pearson Education).

If either competency or task-based analysis must be selected for the entire organization, given the critical nature of the health providing personnel, the former should be selected over the latter. Furthermore, it could be argued that even the most basic administrative tasks will be successfully executed, if the 'right' people are found, who possess the certain core administrative competencies like organizational ability, even if they must be trained in some of the standard operating procedures of the office. Overall, "traditional or task-based job analysis focuses on the job and what is actually being done, whereas competency-based analysis focuses on the person and how the job outcomes are to be accomplished," which is why competency-based analysis has become more favored in the current occupational environment (Senior Professional in Human Resources Exam Prep: Workforce Planning and Employment, 2007, Pearson Education).

All jobs require some training, and eventually, all jobs will require a certain amount of on-site retraining, but if the right person is found, this is usually not an obstacle. Flexibility and commitment is vital, and cannot be reduced to a task for most occupations. "Many organizations believe that the use of competencies is a more strategic approach and better aligns employee behavior with the organization's mission and values than do description of tasks and functions" (Senior Professional in Human Resources Exam Prep: Workforce Planning and Employment, 2007, Pearson Education).