Career Banding in DHHS

You may have heard about “career banding” in state government and wondered how this new system will affect your job. In this introductory article, we’ll explain some of the basics.

What is Career Banding?

Career banding is a new human resource system that affects the way we classify, recruit, hire, pay, promote, evaluate, and provide career development opportunities for our employees. The new system will be phased into DHHS and other state government departments over the next five years.

To reduce the number of job titles in state government, job classifications will be re-organized in the following ways:

• Positions that are similar will be grouped together into more general job categories called job families.
• Each job family will contain a number of career branches.
• Each career branch will contain a number of banded class series that will include your current position.

For example, office assistant III’s, IV’s, and V’s from our current system will be grouped with over 25 other administrative support classes under the new title of administrative support associate. See illustration below:

Will your salary or job duties change?

Although you may have a new job title in the future, your duties will not be likely to change. You will continue to be evaluated on performance. You will also be expected to maintain a certain level of competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities and key behaviors) that are related to your new banded class.

In the current budget year, there are no anticipated salary increases or decreases associated with any jobs that are being converted to a banded class in DHHS. We are currently working on banding our information technology positions and law enforcement positions. Other groups will follow. Your supervisor and human resource office should keep you informed about when your position will be affected.

Banded classes will have wider pay ranges called pay bands. In the future after your job has been “banded,” you may be able to get a pay increase within your new pay range if:

• Budget money is available to fund the increase; and
• Pay studies comparing your pay to private industry and other public employers confirm that employees in your job class are being underpaid; or
• You move up through the new banding pay range by acquiring and demonstrating new job-related competencies on the job.

What are the benefits of Career Banding?

The banding system should make things easier to manage. Here are some expected benefits:

• Managers will have more flexibility than they do under the current system to grant pay adjustments including pay increases for eligible employees.
• With more emphasis on career development, employees will be able to move up through the pay range by acquiring and using new job-related competencies.
• DHHS as a whole should be able to attract and keep more talented employees who know that there is a greater potential for career advancement.

How can you get more information?

For more information, you may go to our DHHS career banding web site at http://www.dhhs.state.nc.us/humanresources/banding or contact your local Human Resources office. You may also want to visit the Office of State Personnel’s web site at http://www.osp.state.nc.us/ExternalHome/ and click on career banding.

Also, watch for more articles in this newsletter in the months to come! We’ll keep you posted as we learn more about how the new system will affect us.

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Last Modified: November 3, 2005