Becoming an Employer of Choice: How Were Subject Matter Experts Selected?

The U of A's strategic focus on enhancing its position as an employer of choice is intended to support employees in many ways, including establishing an environment and framework to attract, retain, inspire and reward the best talent.

This begins by creating compensation plans that are competitive in the market for the particular work an employee is performing. It also includes ensuring each individual feels valued, facilitating flexibility that serves both personal and university needs, and connecting faculty and staff members to our mission.

Experts Leading Classification and Compensation Project 

Pay and career development and advancement paths are popular determinants of whether someone chooses to come to and stay at the U of A. To begin the Compensation and Classification Project, the university needed to ensure that "subject matter experts" across every unit on campus were identified by leadership and engaged to work together to identify similar work performed across campus and group them into applicable job families.

Subsequently, the subject matter experts will be involved in further identifying the work performed across campus to create job profiles, then job descriptions, and visual career paths that contain developmental resources not only to identify opportunities for growth, development and advancement, but also to provide the tools and resources helpful to develop skills needed for other roles. This will help employees build a long, productive and rewarding career on campus. 

"Getting our compensation and classification right is critical to becoming an employer of choice," chief people officer Michelle Hargis Wolfe said. "We're using data to create a consistent structure that ensures we are market competitive across the board." 

How Subject Matter Experts Were Selected 

Bringing in campus perspectives of those close to the work being done helps ensure the job profiles both represent the roles the U of A has today, and roles needed in the future. 

The U of A collaborated with management consulting company Huron, who has developed similar successful programs at other universities, to identify four distinct pools of project group teams — the senior leadership team, compensation advisory committee, compensation work team and project management team. These groups then engaged appropriate subject matter experts across campus to work toward identifying other experts and assigning them to each job family based on their job function. A job family is a broad category of work that can be logically grouped together based on similar characteristics and required skills. Once selected, the subject matter experts have been asked to: 

• Proactively participate in the definition of the work 
• Share feedback 
• Serve as advocates for the new architecture across the community 

The U of A strives to provide transparent and thoughtful updates throughout the project. For further questions about how the subject matter experts were selected or for any additional information about the project, contact the project team at ccproj@uark.edu.