As someone responsible for overseeing a higher education personnel study for three long, miserable years, I read with interest the Charleston Daily Mail‘s story about state employees being asked to update their position descriptions as part of a (desperately needed) personnel system overhaul.
Position descriptions are critical to any effort to classify, compensate, or set performance expectations. Despite this rather obvious fact, I received no support whatsoever for my efforts to get position descriptions updated across higher education. To the contrary, numerous efforts were undertaken to ensure that I was stopped as several human resources “professionals” asserted with straight faces that higher education as we knew it would cease to exist if such a radical idea were not checked.
As a result, state employees will have up-to-date position descriptions come February, while higher education employees (also state employees) will not. It’s amazing what a little leadership can accomplish.