The Office of Personnel Management is about to release the Draft Job Family Position Classification Standard for Technical Work in the Physical Sciences Group, GS-1300. With the release of this draft, we are beginning the new lead agency approach for agency review and test application. Lead agencies for this draft are the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior.
As you recall, last year the Human Resources Management Council (HRMC) concurred with a new approach for testing draft position classification standards in an effort to minimize the test burden on all agencies. We coordinated with the HRMC Classification Chiefs and made test schedule adjustments to accommodate their requests.
Under this approach, we assign lead agencies no more than one full job family standard at a time for review—up to four, in a 12-month period—with exceptions for certain Guides. We may also assign other agencies a limited number of series to review when:
- the lead agencies for a particular study do not have all the covered series; or
- a particular agency is the sole or primary user of a covered series.
As in the past, we will continue to:
- accept all timely comments, including those from "non-lead" agencies; and
- carefully review, assess, and incorporate comments from all sources in the final product.
As is our normal practice, we will notify your classification program chiefs when the draft is available on our Web site for downloading. We are also providing you with a separate notice of this release for planning purposes.
If you have questions or would like to discuss this draft job family standard, please contact Judith A. Davis, of my staff, at (202) 606-2950.
cc: Agency Classification Chiefs
