UCAP Mapping Was Valuable Process, Supervisors Say
Sangita Pawar, assistant vice president of research in the Division of Agriculture, Life and Veterinary Sciences, and Cooperative Extension
Lisa Rulney, associate vice president of financial services and a member of the UCAP Advisory Council
Bart Rossmann, director of instructional and research computing in the College of Humanities
The University Career Architecture Project will soon enter the calibration process, where the UCAP team, in collaboration with University leadership, managers and subject matter experts, will review the results of the career mapping process that most campus units have completed.
During the mapping process, employees worked with their supervisors to review their current positions, including duties and minimum qualifications, and matched the positions to jobs within the UA's new career architecture, which is organized at a broad level by job function. Each function is then broken down into job families.
During the calibration process, the goal will be to ensure consistency in how positions were mapped.
Once completed, UCAP, led by the Division of Human Resources and under the direction of a University-wide advisory council and a project team, will better define nonacademic jobs, support career progression, and better match compensation practices with those used outside the University, according to Human Resources officials. As a result, classified staff and appointed personnel positions will be combined into a new classification called "university staff."
After the calibration process, the next steps will be to:
- Match external market salary data to UA career models and current incumbents. This will allow the University to assess a position's market competitiveness and salary equity.
- Update policies and procedures to ensure they are consistent and equitable for all university staff employees.
The UCAP team sat down with Sangita Pawar, assistant vice president of research in the Division of Agriculture, Life and Veterinary Sciences, and Cooperative Extension, Lisa Rulney, associate vice president of financial services and a member of the UCAP advisory council, and Bart Rossmann, director of instructional and research computing in the College of Humanities, to discuss how they navigated the mapping experience in their units and how they believe UCAP will improve their professional communities.
What is your involvement in UCAP?
Pawar: I supervise a team, so I had to identify where they fit in the architecture. I've also been asked to serve on a UCAP committee that focuses on research positions across the University.
Rulney: I am on the UCAP advisory council, so I've been involved since the beginning. And within Financial Services, I've been working with our administrative team to manage the whole process for FSO (the Financial Services Office).
Rossmann: I'm a director, so my involvement is basically mapping out all of my employees to their new families and roles under UCAP. We mapped 10 employees.
Talk a little bit about your experience with the mapping process for your team.
Pawar: It's important, and it's good that we're doing it. What it made me do was really think as to where my people fit in. As a supervisor, I want to be fair to my staff and advocate for them, so something like this will give me the tools to request more resources for my staff.
Rulney: I have nine direct reports and I mapped all of them myself. We also did a really wonderful session with our executive team, where we had each of our supervisors go to a session with our HR team and they walked through the mapping process. We had Post-it notes for each level and all of the teams within FSO. We had a Post-it for each person, their current title, and their mapped title. That was so valuable because it really helped us see immediately who across the organization was undermapped and who was overmapped. Then we had discussions with individual supervisors after that session to make sure they agreed (where everyone was placed). Once we explained it to them, we didn't have any pushback because it was so easy to see when it was all laid out on the board like that.
Rossmann: It's been pretty easy so far. There were some gray areas, but that was more because of myself and the employee's concern to discuss their trajectory versus the family itself being an issue.
What do you think your unit/department is going to gain from the project?
Rulney: Locally, we have a better understanding of the work that each person does within the organization. Financial Services does a really good job of keeping descriptions up to date, but those are housed within our own hard drive. They're not in a database that HR could quickly access, so my concern is that if we were to push the work to the UCAP team, they would go based on a job description that might not be current. So I feel like mapping at the local level is the right first step. Then doing calibration across the University is going to be really important because we want to ensure that what we're thinking within Financial Services aligns with the rest of the institution.
Rossmann: We're hoping to gain greater flexibility in moving people from role to role over time, as they develop as an employee. We'll have a vast array of levels, which gives us a little more flexibility in putting people in a position that meets their strengths versus just filling in roles on a roster. We certainly don't do that in the educational environment, so I wouldn't do that to my employees.
Some areas have had difficulty with the mapping process. Is there anything you'd like to say about your experience with the project that might help others?
Pawar: We all should do it because it's needed. The structure, the framework, is required, and it is going to benefit everybody at the University. And I think it will give us a fair matrix to decide on compensation and hiring practices.
Rulney: I feel very well-supported by the UCAP project team. They met with us prior to the mapping process because we had some concerns. We wanted to kind of hash it out with them in advance of that session so that we had the subject matter experts' advice as to how we should go with certain positions and certain levels. So that was really helpful because it helped us walk through some of those places where our instinct told us what was mapped was not appropriate. I would say don't hesitate to reach out to them if you're struggling. They've helped us work through every single situation. We share a job description, we talk about it, we come to an agreement, and I feel really well-supported. So if people aren't reaching out, I highly encourage them to do that.
Visit ucap.arizona.edu to keep up with the project and to view more resources related to UCAP.