Kessels, J. W. M., & Smit, C. A. (1996). Job analysis. In T. Plomp & D. P. Ely (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of educational technology (second, pp. 116–125). Cambridge: Elsevier Science Ltd.

Job analysis is an important aspect of human performance technology and its methods and techniques are widely used in recruiting, selecting, job design, appraisal, and organizational development. There is a growing view that it is an indispensable form of analysis in the design process of instructional systems.
Numerous textbooks on instructional design stress its importance (Romiszowski 1981, Tracey 1984, Nadler 1982, Foshay et al. 1986, Davis 1971, Rothwell and Kazanas 1992); however, in daily practice job analysis is rarely carried out. Spurgeon et al. (1984), cited in Patrick (1991), report on a national survey in the United Kingdom which found that less than 20 percent of the employers of computer personnel had carried out any formal analysis of the jobs of programmer, systems analyst, and analyst programmer before developing training provisions. Meanwhile, in the United States, 62 percent of the trainers interviewed did not conduct a structured and systematic needs assessment for design purposes (Pieters 1992 citing Training Oct. 1985). A multiple case study on 17 training programs in the Netherlands, examining nine successful and eight unsuccessful cases, found no occurrence of systematic needs assessment, job, or task analysis (Kessels 1992). The question which naturally arises is whether job or task analysis is actually as indispensable as argued for in literature, or whether the training design practice itself is still in a developmental phase.