Functional Job Analysis definition

Functional job analysis, developed by the Employment and Training Administration of the United States Department of Labor, is concerned with qualitative analysis of a job role and worker that produces unique information based on the employee’s behaviour and actions.

FJA breaks down job roles into seven areas: things, data, worker instructions, reasoning, people, maths and language. Analysis of worker actions within these areas plays a key part of the Functional Job Analysis process.

Better understanding of the employee and the role are positive benefits of FJA, but it can be harder to standardise the analysis across an organisation due to the emphasis on qualitative rather than quantitative methods.