A STUDY TO IDENTIFY CAREER-LADDER POSITIONS, RECORDS MANAGEMENT TASKS, AND EDUCATIONAL CURRICULA FOR ENTRY-LEVEL, INTERMEDIATE, AND ADVANCED RECORDS MANAGEMENT POSITIONS

Records Management is an area of Business Education which, by and large, seems to be overlooked by many business departments in their course offerings both on the secondary and post-secondary level. This problem of overlooking records management and/or teaching inappropriate material apparently stems from a lack of knowledge concerning what records management is, where it should be taught, what material should be covered in such a course, and what job positions are available to those trained in the records management field.;Data were collected through library research and a survey of records management incumbents. The eleven-page questionnaire titled, "Records Management Task Inventory," was reviewed by a panel of judges consisting of the 1978-79 ARMA National Education Committee to determine questionnaire validity. The Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) was identified as the population; the sample of 500 was randomly selected from the ten regions of ARMA located in the United States and Canada. A three-stage mailing was used to maximize respondent returns. A total of 300 questionnaires, or 60 percent, were classified as useable responses.;Data was interpreted by job category to yield information concerning entry-level, intermediate, and advanced job positions in the records management profession. The data was analyzed by a computer using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The reliability program produced a coefficient of .909 for the Records Management Task Inventory. The SPSS program was used to produce crosstabulation tables by job category for various respondent variables. In addition, the "t" test procedure was used to provide statistical analysis of the time-spent data.;Findings revealed that training for four positions in records management could be completed at the four-year college/university level; training for eight positions could be completed at the community/junior college; while training for two positions could be completed at the high school/vocational school level. Findings also showed that tasks performed by 50 percent or more of Job Category 1 workers (entry-level) were mainly those relating to Active Records, many of which were filing related. Tasks performed by Job Category 2 respondents (intermediate) corresponded to those of a supervisory level while Category 3 workers, the managerial level, performed tasks related to planning, organizing, and implementing records programs. A total of 112 tasks were significant at either the .01 or .05 level when comparing performance time of individual tasks between job categories.;The focus of the study was to determine the career-ladder positions that are available to students studying records management at various educational levels; to determine the tasks that are performed by records management personnel at various employment levels; and to determine the tasks that should be included in a records management course at the high school, community/junior college, and four-year college/university level. Thus, tasks that differentiated entry-level from intermediate and advanced records management positions were examined.;Conclusions of the study were that there exists a definite career path for present and prospective records management workers, ranging from the clerical to the managerial level. The breakdown of records management tasks by entry-level, intermediate, and advanced job categories is necessary to accommodate the varying focus of records management positions at these levels. Differences in performance time of individual tasks by workers in various job categories should be considered, along with task frequency, when planning educational programs for present and prospective records management employees. Greatest emphasis should be given to those job tasks which are performed by the largest percentages of records management incumbents.