Ross Coyles is with the Hay Group in Toronto. Job analysis makes up the vast majority of his work. Prior to coming to Hay Ross worked in a small boutique in Toronto, The Assessment and Development Group, working primarily on the development of recruitment and selection programs, performance measurements and management programs. He also worked at Watson Wyatt looking at organizational design and job analysis.

David Creelman: Job analysis is one of those things that has been a fundamental building block of human resources for a long time. And if any of you have formallystudied human resources, either in internal training courses, through SHRM, or at university, job analysis would have been one of those things that you would have touched on. And then it just disappeared from what's talked about; you don't see articles about job analysis in the business press. You don't go to a conference and hear speeches on job analysis. So, here you have a fundamental building block of a profession that is now lying low.

Ross Coyles: Why are we still talking about job analysis? From my point of view the reason is because jobs are still a fundamental building block of organizations, and if jobs go away then we are not going to be talking about job analysis anymore, but I don't think jobs are going away. They may be called different things. They maybe called roles, they may be called perspectives, they may be called any number of things, as they have in the past, being called positions and posts, etc. But as long as jobs are still around, we are going to be doing some form of job analysis.

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