Careers at Rice will update university’s job and pay structures

On July 1 Rice University will launch an initiative called Careers at Rice that is designed to help the university develop and retain world-class staff and enhance competitiveness for recruiting the best employees.

The first wave of the initiative creates a new job structure to enable staff members to fully understand the requirements of their current positions, explore job opportunities and develop plans to build a career at Rice.

As the department responsible for leading the implementation of Careers at Rice, Human Resources consulted with vice presidents, deans, division heads and subject matter experts to develop the new job structure, which is based on three categories of work. The first two categories — exempt individual contributor and nonexempt individual contributor — emphasize the work done by the individual employees. The third category — management — emphasizes leadership and supervision of others as the primary responsibility.

The revised structure organizes jobs into 12 groups or families that share common levels of responsibility, complexity and scope of work and the required skills, education and experience: academic services, athletics, campus safety, communications and marketing, development, enterprise services, facilities and operations, finance, information technology, library, student services and research. Within each job family are subfamilies that include occupational groups of jobs or specialties.

Job levels for individual contributors include entry, experienced and senior; for the management category, levels are supervisor, manager, director and vice president.

Careers at Rice will make the university more consistent with its peer schools, said Associate Vice President for Human Resources Mary Cronin. The revised job classifications incorporate positions that didn’t exist the last time Rice did a major revamp of its job and pay structures, which was in 1993.

A new pay structure that is based on market research will also be introduced to ensure that compensation levels for jobs at Rice are competitive. This will also ensure that the university is able to recruit and retain the highly qualified staff who are so important to Rice in the years ahead, Cronin said.

Careers at Rice will emphasize the value of working at Rice. In addition to pay levels that are competitive with those of Rice’s peer universities, that value includes the benefits package, such as medical insurance, employer-made retirement contributions, tuition reimbursement and free tuition for employees’ children who are accepted to attend Rice and two other universities in Texas, and access to cultural, scholarly and athletic events on campus.

“We’re going to need the very best staff to help us accomplish the goals of the Vision for the Second Century, Second Decade (V2C2),” Cronin said at the most recent town hall meeting, where she gave an overview of Careers at Rice.

“We need staff who are committed to high performance and excellence and who care very, very deeply about Rice,” she said. “That means all of us have to invest in our own performance, but it also means Rice has to invest in you.”

Cronin said the new job structure will lend a consistency across campus and provide better information so that supervisors can help staff build expectations for their jobs and guide them in their jobs. “We will be able to see the kinds of skills and abilities that we have to nurture in ourselves both to do our jobs well and also to prepare ourselves for future jobs,” she said.

Prior to July 1, staff members will be notified what their job classification and pay will be in the 2019 fiscal year under the new structures for Careers at Rice.

For more information, visit http://people.rice.edu/careersrice/.