Job Descriptions: Responsibilities and Duties

Responsibility statements list each of the job’s major duties separately, and describe it in a few sentences. This section may also define the jobholder’s authority limits. For example, the jobholder might have authority to approve purchase requests up to $5,000 or interview and hire new employees. Usually, the manager’s basic question here is, “How do I determine what the job’s duties are and should be?”

The answer first is, from the job analysis; this should reveal what the employees in each job are doing now. Second, you can review various sources of standardized job description information. The U.S. government’s Standard Occupational Classification classifies all workers into one of 23 major groups of jobs, such as “Management Occupations” and “Healthcare Occupations.”

The employer can use standard descriptions like these to identify a job’s duties and responsibilities, such as “Determine the demand for products.” Another simple solution is just to Google the job description you want, by seeing online what others are doing. Thanks to social media such as LinkedIn, line managers today can do things for which they formerly required HR managers.