are being blurred as organizations emphasize teamwork and hold a larger range of employees responsible for communicating and interacting directly with customers, clients, or coworkers inside or outside the organization. Perhaps as a result of these changes, we observe increased within-occupation variability in compensation, employment security, skill requirements, and other outcomes. Nevertheless, this variation suggests that both military and civilian employers are using a wider variety of people and skill mixes to accomplish their missions and goals. Work today often involves teaming people with different skills, backgrounds, and pay structures who have seldom or never worked together before.

Third, the range of choices about how to structure work appears to be increasing. Although market, technological, and demographic forces impinge in systematic ways on how work structures evolve, they are not deterministic. Organizational decision makers, job design specialists, and the tools they use also shape work structures and occupations. We need to better understand how organizational contexts and employment relations influence the technical processes of job design and occupational analysis.

Fourth, the interdependent nature of work structure decisions highlights the need to take a systemic approach to understanding how the context of work is changing and the effects of these changes on outcomes. Technology, work structure, and human resources policies and practices (selection, training, compensation) are all interdependent. A growing body of evidence suggests that bundles of human resources and work practices have bigger effects on performance than individual practices. We therefore need to provide a conceptual map of the broader system of decisions that need to be considered in thinking about work and occupational analysis.