The Development of a Tiered Personnel System in the Federal Government

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1930s, professions had developed to the point where personnel directors could use the professional/nonprofessional distinction as a legitimate organizing principle in the construction of job ladders. The distinction existed at two levels. First, the personnel office recognized a distinction between the job tasks of professionals and non-professionals. Second, this distinction justified the requirement that applicants for professional positions have the appropriate university-level degree. Beginning in the 1930s, the question of whether office work should be similarly organized was debated in a serious way within the federal government. Later, in the years following World War II, the Civil Service Commission, working with federal agencies, constructed a system of job ladders for office work that increasingly resembled the tiered structure the government had created in the 1920s for scientific work.