COMPUTER PERSONNEL SELECTION AND CRITERION DEVELOPMENT: II. DESCRIPTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMER AND ANALYST JOBS

摘要

This is a report on the first phase of a research program devoted to the problems of computer personnel selection and evaluation. The research was designed primarily with the Navy's requirements in mind. In this phase, the computer analyst/programmer job family was structured in terms of common task patterns. A list of 186 task statements that covered a broad spectrum of programming and analytical activities was given to 150 computer personnel from sixteen organiza¬tions. The personnel were drawn from the areas of scientific and engineering, business and logistics, and military systems work. They also provided representation of the system analyst, senior programmer, and programmer job levels. Thirty-six of the personnel are from Navy computer groups: nineteen from NAVCOSSACT and seventeen from NTDS.nThe tasks were rated in terms of the relative amount of time spent at each, and the ratings were then factor-analyzed by designating persons as variables and the tasks as the population sampled. Twenty-two factors emerged in the analysis, seventeen of which are inter-pretable. Each ofthe seventeen is described in terms of the "people clustering on the factor, and in terms of the tasks most highly associated with it. Taken together, the factors represent a job structure of com¬puter personnel positions.nThe information gained regarding the job structure of computer personnel positions will be utilized in the subsequent phases of the research, which will be concerned with the development of criterion measures and predictors of job success for the Navy population. Personnel from other organizations were included in the study to relate the job activities of Navy computer personnel to the larger context of the computer field, so that the relatively small Navy samples can be augmented for future psychometric requirements.