Forget what the job description in the human resources folder says -- do you know what manufacturing supervisors really do on the job?

ACT does. ACT Inc. is a not-for-profit company best known for the ACT college entrance examination. The company's Workforce Development Division focuses on work/job transitions and provides services and research in areas of interest to manufacturing and service companies. Over the past several years the company has amassed thousands of job-task and foundational skill analyses from companies across the United States. In the process of gathering these data, job incumbents, the individuals actually doing the work, describe the specific tasks they do and rate the tasks for importance and the relative amount of time spent doing them. This gives ACT's industrial and organizational psychologists information to assess how critical a given task is for the specific job under study.

A recent study focusing on manufacturing supervisors revealed some surprises.

A portion of ACT's JobPro database of job information focused on manufacturing supervisory jobs was examined to better understand the supervisor's tasks. Results on jobs from 98 manufacturing companies were analyzed, yielding a total of 4,768 tasks (many of which were overlapping from company to company), to determine what supervisors actually do on the job. So, what do they do?

Oliver W. Cummings, assistant vice president, Workforce Development Division, ACT Inc.

Settings Compared

The 98 manufacturing companies analyzed for this study included comparable numbers of jobs in heavy manufacturing (31 jobs), light manufacturing (27 jobs) and process manufacturing (37 jobs). We were surprised to find that except for a slight difference in computer usage -- somewhat higher for process manufacturing  -- there were no significant differences in supervisor on-the-job task categories for heavy versus light versus process manufacturing. This finding may have implications for the transferability of foundational supervisory skills from one manufacturing setting to another.

Tasks Performed

ACT researchers identified 12 major categories of tasks that manufacturing supervisors perform. According to those who are employed as manufacturing supervisors, the task categories below are listed in rank order by the frequency of their occurrence across jobs and tasks.

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