Probation Officer Job Analysis

The job of a probation officer can be split into two parts, job specific and person specific, job specific relates to the task required of the job that any person should have to complete for the job such as handling the case, person specific jobs are attributes, knowledge, skills that a person needs to be able to be considered a viable candidate for the job of a probation officer for example a caring and motivational attitude and knowledge of the criminal justice system. There are many ways to complete a job analysis, the purpose of a job analysis is to evaluate and identify the types of tasks and elements there are to the job and also the type of person that would be able to fulfil the job position best, for example their attributes, their

The F-JAS consists of a 73item questionnaire with a 7point Likert scale which covers each component mentioned earlier (Fleishman, 1975). The job of a probation officer at Bramwell young offenders’ unit has both aspects of person specific and job specific task in it as it such a broad task which covers a lot of different task and responsibilities. A probation officer will be faced with a lot of challenges everyday as they will have many different types of clients each day, not one the same as the other. Cognitive abilities in the F-JAS related to a probation officer as they need to have some knowledge and understanding of the criminal justice system., a probation officer also needs interpersonal/social skills as they will be working one to one with the offender and as a team with the

It was found to have good structural validity as the "interclass reliability coefficients range from .77 to .97 with an average reliability of .87" (Caughron, Mumford and Fleishman, 2013), this was also found in other studies. Siddique in 2007 , looked into the effect that conducting a job analysis has on a company and job performance, they found "a strong, positive associated of a proactive job analysis practise with organisational performance" (Siddique,2007) suggesting that conducting job analyses within companies can have a positive advantage for the company, they concluded that "a proactive job analysis practice is indeed an effective HR strategy to achieve desirable organizational outcomes, such as greater administrative efficiency, healthy organizational climate, better financial performance and stronger relative performance in the industry" (Siddique,