JTA Survey Guide
1. Overview
A job analysis survey is an industry-standard way to get feedback from a large sample of subject matter experts about the importance of a set of tasks or other statements.
The Certiverse platform is designed to make survey creation quick and easy. Many JTA surveys can be published without making any changes. For those users, this User Guide describes how the survey is published and then closed and how participants are invited. For users who need to modify the default configuration, or who require more information, this Guide explains all the configuration options.
Access the “Survey” tab to customize and publish your JTA survey. You can change the title, edit the “Welcome” and “Thank You” screens, include background questions, modify the rating scales, and edit the last “Anything else?” question. This screen also allows you to configure access to the survey, invite participants, view participant status (completed, in progress, not started), resend invitations, and generate a generic link.
2. Survey Title
By default, the survey is named for the JTA, but you may edit this title, which is used in invitations and other places to identify this JTA survey.
3. Survey Parts
The survey has several parts, described below, which appear as an outline. You can click on any part to configure it. Global settings are located at the top right of the screen.
Part 1. Welcome page. This part of the survey includes the welcome message, a brief introduction to the survey, a consent form, the job/role description, etc.
Tip: Overall survey instructions can be added to this screen.
Part 2. Background and Demographics questions. These questions about background (e.g., degree of experience with the job/role) or demographics can be enabled, and respondents will be asked to provide the required information. These questions and responses are shown at the end of this User Guide.
Tips:
- Background questions may be used to remove unqualified respondents. To enable this analysis option, enable the question or questions that would help identify unqualified respondents.
- Demographics are most often used for reporting purposes. Enable the required questions to collect these data. You should enable the “Demographics explanation” if you enable any of the demographics questions and the explanation should be consistent with your planned use of these data.
- To streamline your experience, these background and demographics questions can only be enabled or disabled, not edited. The “Demographics explanation” can be edited.
Part 3. Task Ratings. The main part of the JTA survey asks respondents to rate each task statement on a number of importance dimensions. By default, the rating scales are Frequency (“Never,” “Rarely,” “Monthly,” “Weekly,” and “Daily”) and Importance (“Not at all,” “Slightly,” “Fairly,” “Very,” and “Critically”). Rating dimensions can be added, edited, and removed.
In the analysis of the survey data, the overall “criticality” of each task statement is computed as a weighted average of the dimensions. By default, the weights are: 1*Frequency + 2*Importance. The weights of the dimensions can be modified.
Tip: Always add rating scales so that either (a) rating anchor 5 is most important or (b) with a negative weight and anchor 1 as most important. A weight of zero can be used for rating scales that should not be included in the criticality calculation.
Part 4. Open-Ended Feedback. This section consists of a single open-ended question that allows the respondents to leave any feedback or comments about the survey.
Part 5. Thank you screen. This section shows the thank you message and the contact information in case the respondents have questions.
4. Previewing a survey
Click the preview button to see the survey in a new tab just as the respondent will see the survey. Make any necessary changes to the tasks or survey configuration.
5. Publishing a survey
When your survey is ready for administration, configure “Access Settings.” By default, survey respondents do not have to be Certiverse users; to force survey respondents to create a Certiverse account (to complete the survey), toggle “Require Log-in" to the “On” position. To allow a generic link to the survey, toggle “Generic Survey Link” to the “On” position.
Tips:
- Require Log-in" and “Generic Survey Link” are not incompatible. Respondents who click on the generic link will be prompted to create a Certiverse login.
- Most often, you do not want to force JTA participants to log in to the Certiverse platform to complete a JTA survey. However, it may be tactical to require JTA participants to establish a Certiverse account to complete a JTA survey as a way of creating a ready pool of subject matter experts to write items (in the next phase, after the blueprint is completed).
To publish the survey (to make it available for respondents) toggle the “Survey” toggle to the “On” position. Some edits are disallowed while the survey is published (while the “Survey” is toggled in the “On” position). You can make changes by toggling “Survey” to the “Off” position, before making those changes. This may affect respondents who have an active survey session, or who try to start a survey while “Survey” is in the “Off” position.
6. Invite participants
Once the survey is published, you can invite participants in two ways:
Have the system send individual invitation emails by accessing the “Survey Respondents” icon and pasting a comma-separated list of the respondents’ email addresses.
Copy the “Generic Survey Link” (after toggling this feature on, if needed).
All invited participants can be managed through the “Survey Respondents” interface:
You can view the list of respondents along with the survey due date and status.
For users who have not completed the survey, you can resend the invitation or remove the individual from the respondent list.
Tip: There is no limit to the number of survey invitations, but the generic link is more convenient for large numbers of recipients. When pasting email addresses, only about 400 email addresses can be pasted at a single time (so a list of 800 email addresses would need to be split into two parts).
7. Closing the survey and next steps
Once enough people have completed the survey, you can toggle the “Survey” to the “off” position to lock the survey.
The next step is to move to the “Analysis“ tab to review the JTA analysis.
Tip: Determining what size sample is sufficient can be difficult. Large samples are always better, but even small, representative samples of attentive survey respondents are useful: samples of size 6, 12, 36, 100, and 1000 reduce uncertainty about average task criticality by 59%, 71%, 83%, 90% and 97%.
8. Contact Us
If you have any questions, please email support@certiverse.com.
Background and Demographic Questions
Background Questions
Nature of job/role experience [Multiple Choice Single Selection]
• I’m working in this position now.
• I’ve worked in this position in the past.
• I’m training to work in this position.
• I’m a direct manager of this position (they report directly to me).
• I manage people who manage this position (they report directly to me).
• Other, I have considerable knowledge about this position.
Length of experience with job/role [Multiple Choice Single Selection]
• Less than 3 months
• 3 – 5 months
• 6 – 11 months
• 1 – 2 years
• 3 – 4 years
• 5 or more years
• None. I have no experience with this position
Job Title [Free Response]
(Please use a generic title that will be clear to the general public)
Country [pick list]
Education [Multiple Choice Single Selection]
• Less than High School
• High School Graduate
• Some College
• Associate’s Degree
• Vocational School Degree/Certificate
• Bachelor’s Degree
• Master’s Degree
• Professional Degree (e.g. DDS, JD, MD)
• Doctorate Degree (e.g. Ph.D.)
• I prefer not to answer.
Demographic Questions
Demographics explanation [information]
Demographics. The following questions ask about your identification with various demographic groups. We are required to document the aggregate diversity of the demographics of survey respondents. Responses to these items will be reported in aggregate and will not otherwise affect the results.
Gender [Multiple Choice Single Selection]
• Man
• Woman
• Non-binary
• Other
• I prefer not to answer
Age [Free response]
I am
• I prefer not to answer
• [Numeric response]
Ethnicity [Multiple Choice Single Selection]
• African American or Black
• Asian
• Hispanic or Latino
• Middle Eastern or North African
• Native American or Alaska Native
• Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
• White or Caucasian
• I identify as two or more of these categories
• Other (none of the above)
• I prefer not to answer
Contact Us
If you have any questions or need additional assistance, please contact us by either emailing support@certiverse.com or by submitting a ticket from this article.