When was the last time you read your job description? Or, if it is a separate document, your “roles and responsibilities” description?
My guess it was about the time you applied for your current position. Of course, someone decided to change your description you might have read the new document but even then, did you?
I now I’m atypical because I haven’t had a job description for a long time but I honestly can’t recall ever reading them after I got the job. And I’m not even sure I read them much before then. Once you get beyond the title most of it is boiler plate and I quickly loose interest.
My guess is most people remember little more then the job title.
Like so many documents, it goes in one eye and out the other. The longer it is, the less you are likely to remember.
So it won’t surprise you when I say: I don’t think roles and responsibilities documents have much use. And it might not surprise you when I say roles are pretty pointless too.
To my mind your personal sense of identity, your own idea of who you are and what you do, plays a much bigger role in the actions you take in work and the responsibilities you accept – and those you ignore.
If, for example, your business card says: “Business Analyst”. It is not because someone defined your work as a “Business Analyst” it is because you see yourself as a business analysts and your sought out a business analyst job. What you less to do with what it says in some document, it has more to do with how you define yourself and therefore your role.
If you consider yourself to be a programmer, a software engineer, software developer or whatever, then you may shun business cards altogether. That again is part of your sense of identity. Identity is a far bigger driver of what you do than any document.
Try this: imagine you go to a meetup for people like you – be you a business analyst, a programmer, a tester or whatever. The room is full of people who share your job title – and similar role and responsibility documents. You see an inspiring speaker who advocates people like you – with your job title – undertake a new activity called XYZ. You see how it can benefit your work.
When you go to work the next day do you: look for opportunities to apply XYZ, or do you find your roles and responsibilities document and check whether XYZ falls within your remit?
For some years I’ve been wanting to try and experiment – but I need a really forward looking, daring, company to work with me on this. I want to flip recruitment.
The company advertises a job by title with few, if any, details. They ask people to apply not with a CV (resume) but with the job description they would write for such a job. The candidate sets out the role and responsibilities as they see it. The company then interviews those people who write the description that bests matches their own thinking and the candidates get to explain how they would live up to that description.
Crazy erh?
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