It’s Time to Rethink Job Descriptions for the Digital Era | Harvard Business Review

Job titles and descriptions have been the cornerstone of virtually every talent practice—from workforce planning, recruiting, hiring, compensation, career development, and learning and development, to name a few. But as work continues to transform quickly and becomes less predictable, there is a growing realization that organizing work into a fixed set of tasks and responsibilities (jobs)—and labeling them (titles)—present limitations for organizations’ talent management. This article provides ideas for reimagining how to adjust job titles and descriptions to better fit today’s business environment. It gives a few examples of how traditional job titles and descriptions can be expanded to be more flexible and broader in scope to accommodate the evolving nature of work. As firms attempt to organize work beyond the constraints of job titles and descriptions, they can refer to a Deloitte article, Beyond the Job: Developing New Work Models. The article recommends firms “organize work by creating very broad commitments to problems to be solved, outcomes to be achieved, or new sources of value to be created, essentially providing guardrails for workers in terms of the broad “what” of work but giving them the freedom and autonomy to choose the “how.” While job titles and descriptions are unlikely to go away any time soon, firms can benefit from thinking through new ways to organize and coordinate work beyond job titles and descriptions. They will also need to think through the implications of these new approaches on their talent strategies, practices, and programs.