The Social Security Administration has posted a notice on the Federal Business Opportunities website indicating that it wishes to hire a contractor to study position descriptions for its Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR). Here's some background information:
The organizational changes associated with this growth, most recently with the reorganization of SSA’s Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA) into the current ODAR, has contributed, over time, to the accrual of multiple Position Descriptions (PDs), which describe the functions of the various jobs our workforce performs. As a result, ODAR now has over 1,000 PDs, some so antiquated they still refer to OHA, and some similar enough such that employees performing essentially the same duties in one region have difficulty qualifying for promotion in another region because the same duties there are under a different PD. ... Rather than continue with the status quo, ODAR desires a smaller set of PDs. With the exception of revising ALJ [Administrative Law Judge], AAJ [Administrative Appeals Judge], and AO [Adjudicative Officer] PDs, ODAR would like a revised set of national, updated, standard (de-specialized) workload PDs. ODAR would then present this revised set to SSA’s Office of Human Resources for classification approval and institutionalization.
2 comments:
The influx of attorney hires at the AC and HOs since 2009 means that some of those earlier hires would be now eligible for promotion to management or other roles, but in some cases there are no PDs suitable for attorneys. The process for transfering regions, even for DWs performing the same position, is also needlessly archaic, and PDs differ by region for the exact same job function.
This is interesting. I guess it's too much wishful thinking to hope there might be a serious change of job description/ODAR composition--like when they created the gs-13 GSs and made paralegals and attorneys go to gs-12, removed the supervisory attorney and office manager and reassigned their duties, etc.-- resulting from this, huh?
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