A METHODOLOGY TO FACILITATE OCCUPATIONAL TASK GROUPING - MEETING THE DEMANDS OF TRAINING ANALYSIS AND PLANNING

Methods for grouping occupational tasks are required to support a broa d range of personnel actions and organizational planning activities. H aving subject matter experts sort tasks into groups is the only method ology generally recognized for these purposes. For many applications, however, and training in particular, analyses that cover large areas o f an organization may be required. For such uses, manual sorting is co stly and may be infeasible. A new method, based on statistical cluster ing using task co-performance, is described. Results indicate that thi s method can replicate much of the structure of the experts' groups an d so can be used to facilitate task grouping. Implications of this new approach are discussed.