ABSTRACT
Job classifications provide a general framework for human resource administration. Clearly, compensation is based on classifications. In addition, career movement takes place within classifications. Promotions, transfers and layoffs occur primarily within a cluster of similar positions. The recruitment, examination, and selection of new employees can efficiently use the same process for positions in the same classification. A narrow definition of a grouping provides more precision in hiring, promoting, and paying an employee, but at the sacrifice of more employee mobility and managerial flexibility. One of the reform efforts in public personnel management in the United States since the end of the twentieth century has been broadbanding, i.e., collapsing related narrow job classifications into a common, more general one. The trend in countries that have had broad classifications, on the other hand, has been to break out more specific
developments in technology.
