Career Tracks: Background

Last Updated: April 5, 2018 1:35:58 PM PDT

Learn the history of Career Tracks, a systemwide job classification structure.

Systemwide background

Career Tracks was first developed at UC Berkeley and was implemented in 2009 with the name “Career Compass.”

Campuses proceeded to work on their own campus versions. In Fall 2012, the Office of the President began to provide assistance and consistency to campuses’ implementation of Career Tracks. A systemwide steering committee worked through a review of the many families of work and developed consistent language for all campuses to use for non-represented positions. Draft job language was disseminated to the campuses for input from subject matter experts and the campus Compensation unit. As each family was completed systemwide, each campus implemented the new classifications/ titles for its positions.

Families could not be implemented until OP finalized the systemwide matrices and made them available to the campuses for use.

UC San Diego background

We implemented Career Tracks in 5 phases.

Phase 1

At UC San Diego, we began Phase 1 in 2010 with Information Technology positions to develop language to reflect how work is done at UC San Diego by adapting UC Berkeley’s product to fit UC San Diego.

The campus Human Resources Compensation Analysts worked closely with the campus subject matter experts on the Programmer/Analyst Advisory Committee (PAAC). The group reviewed UC Berkeley’s job language plus classification specifications and samples of our current job descriptions, consulted with a campuswide advisory committee, and solicited comments from departments with IT positions. The resulting set of draft job matrices for Information Technology work provided the bulk of the new systemwide matrices.

Once the Office of the President finalized the IT matrices in February 2015, UC San Diego started mapping the over 600 campus IT positions to the new Career Tracks titles. PAAC served as the SMEs and were extremely helpful, not only in the development of the IT matrices, but also in the mapping determinations and discussions. The new JDOnline system with the Career Tracks job builder was ready on March 30, 2015. Compensation had preliminary discussions with departments and VC offices and sent out the final IT mapping spreadsheets to the departments on May 29, 2015 so the departments could start preparing the new job descriptions, using the job builder, to reclass the IT positions laterally into the new Career Tracks payroll titles.

Phase 2 and later

Phase 2 Career Tracks involved implementing more than one family at a time. Future families were implemented as OP finalized the matrices, and in phased approaches, mapped more than one family at a time. The mapping of positions was also based on the appropriate timing for the families involved.

Historical documents

Contact the Human Resources Compensation Analyst for your Vice Chancellor area.

Notice: The information on this page summarizes provisions of university policies and/or collective bargaining agreements. Refer to the Personnel Policies for Staff Members (PPSM) and local implementing procedures or applicable collective bargaining agreement for full text of referenced information.