Direct activities of subordinates
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The reporting and paperwork around management automate well. Directing, developing and evaluating people does not, and people do not accept it when it is attempted on them.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Managing, training and developing people |
| Jobs that do it | 14 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Enterprise platforms |
| O*NET activity | Guiding, Directing, and Motivating Subordinates (4.A.4.b.4) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 14 occupations that perform it.
- Plan, organize and direct activities of seasonal staff members.
- Direct research of other teachers or of graduate students working for advanced academic degrees.
- Recruit, train, and supervise department personnel, such as faculty and student writing instructors.
- Monitor teachers or teacher assistants to ensure adherence to special education program requirements.
- Monitor teachers and teacher assistants to ensure that they adhere to inclusive special education program requirements.
- Direct activities of workers who assist in arranging, cataloguing, exhibiting, and maintaining collections of valuable materials.
- Train and supervise curatorial, fiscal, technical, research, and clerical staff, as well as volunteers or interns.
- Supervise and work with volunteers.
- Direct and train library staff in duties, such as receiving, shelving, researching, cataloging, and equipment use.
- Train other staff, volunteers, or student assistants and schedule and supervise their work.
- Coordinate activities of workers engaged in cataloging, distributing, and maintaining educational materials and equipment in curriculum libraries and laboratories.
- Direct and supervise curatorial, technical, and student staff in the handling, mounting, care, and storage of art objects.
What we would actually use
Nothing in our landscape addresses this work. That is the honest answer rather than a padded list: this activity needs a person present, or a machine rather than a software agent.
Buy nothing. The reporting and paperwork around management run on whatever you already use for documents, and the part that is actually managing people does not automate at any price.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Enterprise platforms
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
14 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Archivists
- Computer Science Teachers, Postsecondary
- Curators
- English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary
- Instructional Coordinators
- Librarians and Media Collections Specialists
- Library Technicians
- Museum Technicians and Conservators
- Park Naturalists
- Special Education Teachers, Elementary School
- Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten
- Special Education Teachers, Middle School
- Special Education Teachers, Preschool
- Special Education Teachers, Secondary School
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Supervise personnel activities”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.