The effects of data type on job classification and its purposes

Often, organizational psychologists use methods of classification to group individual jobs into larger groups that are then used for personnel-related functions. In classifying jobs, researchers and practitioners make several important considerations, such as deciding on the type of data collected and choosing the appropriate quantitative clustering method. We highlight some of these considerations with a dataset comprising three different types of ability data. Complementing previous research, these three ways of measuring ability requirements resulted in substantially different job clusters. Although these differences did not have clear implications for the practical purposes examined – test validation, job evaluation, and career exploration – it was evident that the differences influenced the final results obtained and therefore would influence personnel decisions made from them.