What is the difference between a Job Family, a Job Category, and a Job Title?
The Job Family is a group of jobs that serve a similar overall function such as Information Technology or Human Resources. Jobs are typically further broken down into job categories with job titles to provide clarity for comparison with salary survey data. The Job Category is a further delineation of a job family that allows similar job functions to be combined for purposes of evaluation and management of that function i.e. Systems Applications within the Information Technology Job Family. The Job Title is associated with a job based upon the required competencies and responsibilities of that position. For the purposes of the Competencies Program, the Job Title is used within IBIS (Penn State’s central information system) along with the Level to designate a job that will be matched to market data, such as Programmer/Analyst Level 1 or Human Resources Specialist Level 2.
