Increasingly, commentators and writers are discussing the idea that the nature of jobs and work is changing so much that the concept of a “job” may be obsolete for many people. For instance, in some high-technology industries employees work in cross-functional project teams and shift from project to project. The focus in these industries is less on performing specific tasks and duties and more on fulfilling responsibilities and attaining results. For example, a project team of eight employees developing software to allow various credit cards to be used with ATMs worldwide will work on many different tasks, some individually and some with other team members. When that project is finished those employees will move to other projects, possibly with other employers. Such shifts may happen several times per year. Therefore, the basis for recruiting, selecting, and compensatingthese individuals is their competence and skills, not what they do.
Even the job of managers changes in such situations, for they must serve their project teams as facilitators, gatherers of resources, and removers of roadblocks.
However, in many industries that use lower-skilled workers, traditional jobs continue to exist. Studying these jobs and their work consequences is relatively easy because of the repetitiveness of the work and the limited number of tasks each worker performs.
Clearly, studying the two different types of jobs—the lower-skilled ones and highly technical ones—requires different approaches. Many of the typical processes associated with identifying job descriptions are still relevant with the lower-skilled, task-based jobs. However, for fast-moving organizations in hightechnology industries, a job description is becoming an obsolete concept. Employees in these “virtual jobs” must be able to function without job descriptions and without the traditional parameters that are still useful with less changeable jobs.
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