Henderson (1979), defined “a job as work consisting of responsibilities sand duties, that are sufficiently alike, to justify being covered by a single job analysis.”

Harvey (1991) defines a job as “a collection of positions similar enough to one another in terms of their work behaviors, to share a common job title”.

Scientific management states that the key to ensuring good levels of productivity is a very good knowledge of the different tasks, which make up a job. A thorough understanding of what is to be achieved, as well as the knowledge of the abilities and material required to do a job are essential to standardize the action of workers ,like the functioning of the machine.

Workers and management began to take increased interest in job analysis because of two reasons:

  1.  Fear of unfair discrimination
  2. The need to compare the merit of different individual employees holding different jobs, to claim equal pay, on the basis of comparable quality of their respective job/work.

“If you don’t know a job’s duties, responsibilities and human required, how can you decide who to hire or how to train them?”

Job Analysis can be defined as a structured, multi-method approach aimed at defining the skills, knowledge and personal attributes necessary for effective performance. It is the systematic process of discovery of the nature of a job by dividing it into small units. The final outcome of job analysis is the preparation of job description and job specification.

According to Gary Dessler, “job analysis is the procedure for determining the duties and skill requirements of a job and a kind of person who should be hired for it”

Similarly, according to Decenzo and Robbins, “a job analysis is a systematic exploration of the activities with a job. It is a basic technical procedure, one that is used to define the duties, responsibilities and accountabilities of a job.”

Thus, job analysis is just an accurate recording of the activities ,where information are gathered to define the specific job attributes .It produces information used for writing job description( a list of what the job necessities ) and job specification (what kind of people to hire for the job).

The HR specialist normally collects one or more of the following types of information in job analysis:

  1. Work Activities: The information related to actual activities one individual performed in a job, such as cleaning, selling, teaching etc. are
  2. Human Behaviour: The information related to human behaviour such as sensing, communicating, writing are collected.
  3. Machine, tools, equipments, and work aids: The information related to tools used, material processed, knowledge applied etc. are
  4. Performance Standard: The information related to the types for performance standard need and are used is This is required to appraise the employees’ performance.
  5. Job Context: The information related with the working conditions, work schedule and social context of organization are
  6. Human requirement: This includes information regarding the job’s human requirement, such as job related knowledge or skill and personal