Job analysis methods and applications

¶ … level management position in a marketing department. The practice of marketing has become important in the current business environment. This is probably because of the consumerism phenomenon that takes place in most developed countries. As a consequence, companies' activity is focused on developing products and services, on promoting them, and on distributing them. Therefore, marketing specialists must develop strategies intended to increase the volume of sales of their companies. Given the importance of the aspects involved in the marketing process, people hired in marketing departments are expected to possess a series of skills and abilities. In the case of management positions, the requirements are even higher and also refer to leadership and management skills.

Tasks

RTS

DL

M

C

R

EFIL

Maintain relationship with customers

Maintain relationship with suppliers

3

1

3

1

1

7

Collaborate to developing marketing strategy

3

3

3

2

1

18

4. Identify potential markets

3

3

2

1

0

0

5. Provide product research and development ideas

Tasks are represented by units of work, or sets of activities required in order to produce certain results (McNamara, 2010). As one may observe from the table presented above regarding the importance and difficulty of tasks assigned to an entry level management position in the marketing department, the most important task for this position is represented by the employee's collaboration with the marketing manager, the marketing department, and other departments in developing the company's marketing strategy. The EFIL of this task is 18.

This task is followed by the task regarding maintaining the relationship with the company's customers. Given the fact that the company's activity and strategy are oriented towards satisfying customers, identifying their needs, and increasing their loyalty level, this task is an important one, which explains its EFIL of 11. Although there are other employees that fulfill this task, the entry level management position within the marketing department assumes a direct relationship with customers and involves negotiation skills.

Another important task for this position is represented by maintaining the relationship with suppliers, with an EFIL of 7. This means that the company values its suppliers, and has assigned employees to maintain this relationship. In other words, the people dealing with this task must ensure that suppliers are satisfied with the prices they established with the company, that they are able to fulfill the deals, and that they are able to satisfy the company's supply needs in case the demand for the company's products increases.

There are other tasks required by this position, like identifying potential markets and participating with ideas in the product research and development process. Although these tasks are very important to the company's marketing strategy, this position is less involved in these tasks and activities in comparison with other positions. Therefore, they are not considered as important for this position as the tasks discussed above.

The tasks analyzed in the job analysis table are obviously connected with the practice of marketing. The job position analyzed in this paper focuses on participating to the marketing strategy development process and on the maintenance of the relationship with customers and suppliers. Although marketing managers are not necessarily supposed to manage the company's relationship with its customers and suppliers, it is the manager's job to negotiate contracts with important customers and suppliers, to negotiate distribution tariffs, and to ensure that suppliers are able to satisfy the requirements of the company. Given the fact that this is an entry position, these tasks are intended to help the employee get acquainted with the managerial requirements of the marketing department.

Although the job's task are oriented towards the marketing strategy and satisfying customers, the tasks are diversified, they address several different issues, which means one cannot determine a pattern in this case. Also, the marketing department's activity is correlated with the activity of other departments, like the sales, the research and development, and the financial department. This requires a series of skills and experience in such activities. The tasks discussed above, along with other tasks are intended to help the employee hired for this position to gain the experience required by the management position.

However, there are several disadvantages associated with this job's design. For example, the tasks described above address a variety of issues, not allowing the employee to become highly specialized in a certain area. Management positions require high specialization levels. In other words, the job should be oriented towards more narrow fields in the marketing practice. The employee in case should be trained either on sales, on promotion, on distribution, on research and development, on production, and candidates for this position should be selected based on skills in these areas.