Career Tracks

Career Tracks is the classification system for non-represented staff positions across UC, including the Davis campus and UC Davis Health.

Career Tracks accurately lists job descriptions, aligns them with the competitive market and assigns the same classification to comparable positions at all UC locations.

Career Tracks should give employees and supervisors greater understanding of staff roles and the steps needed for career development.

Career Tracks supports UC Davis and UC Davis Health by:

  • Standardizing job classification levels, job descriptions, and positions.
  • Explaining the similarities and differences among specialties and levels.
  • Easily identifying specific types of positions across both campuses.
  • Providing development paths through matrices that show progression of levels.
  • Comparing specific titles to the labor market when matching jobs to survey data.

Career Tracks Structure

The Career Tracks Structure consists of Families, Functions, Categories and Levels. 

  • Overview (PDF)
    Depicts relationship between families, functions, categories and levels
     
  • Career Tracks Standards
    Describe the scope, key responsibilities, knowledge and skills requirements for nearly all jobs at UC Davis. 

Families, Functions, Categories and Levels 

Career Tracks Project FAQs
 

  • What is Career Tracks?
  • Career Tracks is a job classification framework that aligns jobs at the University to their respective labor market by occupation and supports the development of possible career paths designed to enhance career mobility.  Levels for individual contributor, supervisory and management roles within each distinct functional area are defined consistently across occupations and with the labor market for comparable jobs.

    Each employee is assigned a payroll job title that is part of a designated job family and function.  Each job title has been assigned a personnel program (MSP or PSS), an exemption status and corresponding salary grade and range.   The personnel program and exemption status have been applied consistently throughout UC.
  • Which staff are part of Career Tracks?
  • All UC staff who are not represented by unions and are not part of the Senior Management Group (SMG), Academic or students have been mapped to a job title to the Career Tracks structure.
  • Why was Career Tracks implemented?
  • Our previous classification system was built on UC systemwide classifications that have become outdated.  Career Tracks more accurately reflects current job duties, organized within job families and functions.  This new structure sets the foundation for a more transparent classification and career planning process going forward and allow us to better align our jobs to the external labor market.
  • For different job families and functions, there are categories of jobs, and career levels. What do those terms mean?
  • These terms distinguish the work that people perform. By looking at the differences in scope and responsibility between jobs, we can describe each job more accurately in relation to other jobs.

    The family is a group of jobs that involve work in the same general occupation. These jobs have related knowledge requirements, skill sets, and abilities. Finance is an example of a family.   It is a general way to organize job functions into bigger groups to ease searching through the numerous job functions available.

    The function is a more specialized area within a family. In a function, the same or relatively similar work is performed, a similar skill set is required, and it is possible to move within the function with minimal training.  For example, Purchasing is a function within the Finance family.

    The category defines the type of work performed, as opposed to the occupation or subject matter. The three categories are:
    1) Operational & Technical
    2) Professional
    3) Supervisory & Management.

    A job function can include more than one type of work, so within Purchasing, you could have jobs in both professional and supervisory & management categories. 
  • What if a Job Standard does not fully represent an individual’s job duties?
  • The “boiler-plate” or generic job standards rarely reflect the unique work each individual may be asked to perform as part of their regular responsibilities. The work performed by an individual reflects the organizations goals and structure.  The goal is to capture at least 50% - 60% of the predominant job duties for a given job. Supervisors and managers can use the job standards as a starting point in developing customized job descriptions that reflect the positions unique responsibilities, yet still align to the job standards for all UC staff in that job. 
  • When Career Tracks was implemented it involved "mapping" positions. Tell me more.
  • The process of moving a job from the current classification/job title into a new job title that is part of a designated job family and function is referred to as “mapping.”

    Many individuals wear multiple hats.  How were positions handled that incorporated duties from multiple job functions?
    The major duties of a given job, (i.e. the reason the position exists), determined how to map it to a new job function. Positions that are multifunctional were mapped to the job function that constitutes more than 50 percent of the job.  If no one component of the job was 50 percent or more, the job function that has the greatest percentage of duties, or the function that was emphasized during recruiting was used. 

    Is there an overview describing each job level in the new job structure?
    For a description of each professional, supervisory and management job level, see the Categories and Levels (PDF) for more information.

    Two employees are currently in the same job title.  Their new Career Tracks job titles are different.  Why might this be the case?
    It may be the case that when comparing current job descriptions for employees in the same job titles, the responsibilities, scope, required knowledge and skills, staff size, or other key variables were different.  Or, over time job duties changed for a given employee but the job description on record was never updated to reflect assumption of additional responsibilities.  

    The implementation of Career Tracks job titles provides the organization with a fresh review of the current role and responsibilities for each employee.  New titles were assigned in consultation with managers to ensure that the most current information for each job was taken into account for assigning a job title in the new structure.