tate more external hiring. This information needs to be standardized in order to be useful, but the demand for standardization militates against the trend toward broader jobs and more permeable boundaries between them, a development that leads toward more variations within job titles. Thus, occupational classification systems may need to allow for this variation and help those designing jobs to better understand the organizational forces that influence how work is done today.

Finally, if, as suggested in this chapter, the scope and pace of organizational restructuring is accelerating, then the speed with which jobs are changing is also increasing. To be accurate, occupational classification systems must therefore be updated more frequently. And, as we suggest in Chapter 5, if they are to become a significant aid to decision makers whose actions are shaping work structures, they will need to be transformed from backward-looking tools that describe and classify jobs to more forward-looking analytic tools that generate options for how work might be structured in the future.