1/15 Weekly Email + Job Descriptions
Hi all,
I have a few updates and reminders this week.
MLK Holiday: Next Monday, January 19th, is MLK Day, a City Holiday. Please don’t come to work if you’re not scheduled.
I don’t have any new thoughts on MLK Day, but did want to relink my email from last year where I discuss his legacy as both a civil rights leader and a labor organizer. Many people forget that he saw fair working conditions as integral in the fight for equal rights and worked closely with labor groups to improve workplaces. One of the last speeches he gave before his assasination in 1968 was to a group of striking Memphis solid waste workers - you can read more about those events here.
UAEA also attended the 2026 MLK Breakfast on Monday, January 12th. This annual event commemorates the life and lessons of MLK - speakers talk about the relevance of his work to the present and multiple members of the community are usually honored for their work in advancing his values. This year saw several impressive honorees, including Billie Harris, the “Jackie Robinson of Softball.” Billie played professional softball in the Southwest for six decades, starting in 1948, and enduring a considerable amount of discrimination and mistreatment because of her race throughout her career. Her leagues also didn’t pay players for most of her career - outside of vouchers for food at games, she had to pay her own way to participate in the majority of games she played. Despite these obstacles, Billie was a great player - over 370 games during her professional softball career, Harris had 264 hits, scored 123 runs, and pitched 70 no-hitters, including four perfect games. In 1979, she was inducted into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame, and in 1982 she was the first African American woman inducted into the Amateur Softball Association Hall of Fame.
I don’t see any updates on the Tempe website with information about the other winners but I’ll try to post a link when I see it. Other winners included an organization which helped organize dozens of volunteers to help clean up storm damage in October, and a local student who has been documenting the stories of unhoused individuals across the Valley for years. It was nice to see the different ways people have been living the values of Dr King, and nice, as always, to see them receive the recognition for their efforts that they deserve.
Job Highlight: UAEA is here to support people’s career development in 2026, and I wanted to start by highlighting some open roles on the Tempe hiring site (keep in mind there are far fewer than normal due to the hiring pause - the site normally has 60-80 open roles). These have been open for several months and the deadline for first reviews has come and gone - my assumption is that the departments have seen a lack of qualified candidates and are interested in interviewing anyone who can meet minimum qualifications. There are 29 open positions but I think these 4 are ones that more than 1 or 2 UAEA members might find interesting - that said, if you have direct experience in museum curation or redeveloping commercial districts, I would take another look at the hiring site.
UTILITIES SERVICES TECHNICIAN / SENIOR UTILITIES SERVICES TECHNICIAN / PRINCIPAL UTILITIES SERVICES TECHNICIAN - Job Code 902348. Ranges are 104, 106, and 108
These positions handle repairs to Tempe water systems. No experience with water infrastructure is needed to apply, just a highschool diploma and some experience with “general construction, plumbing, HVAC systems or related field.” If you have Facilities or Building Maintenance experience, you can probably get an interview. You can get all necessary certifications for this role in your first year on the job, and it’s a flex-series, meaning you can automatically be promoted to higher ranges once you have a certain amount of experience and certificates.
HEAVY EQUIPMENT OPERATOR / SENIOR HEAVY EQUIPMENT OPERATOR (FIELD OPERATIONS - SOLID WASTE) - Job Code 902349. Ranges are 105 and 107
These positions pick up solid waste in Tempe. You’ll need a Class A Commercial license to apply as well as one year experience with heavy equipment, but you do not need any solid waste-specific experience to apply to the base level role. This means you may already have the required credentials and experience if you work in Streets or Parks and use certain heavy equipment in your daily work. One important caveat for this position - you could be assigned to any of the three solid waste crews when you start, based on department need. You will receive plenty of training when you start regardless of where you’re assigned, but just be warned that you are not guaranteed a role in Bulk, Sideload, or Frontload.
INSTRUMENTATION AND CONTROL TECHNICIAN - Job Code is 902373. Range is 110.
This position maintains control equipment for Tempe water systems at the water plants. A background in this sort of work would certainly help, but the role has been open for a while, which I assume means they’re having difficulty finding someone with direct experience. The role requires the equivalent to an associate’s degree in electrical/industrial sciences, but the work requirements are a little more vague - I think someone in Fleet with training in truck console repair or someone in another area of Water with some experience with maintenance work might get an interview.
ADMINISTRATIVE ANALYST – PUBLIC WORKS - Job Code 902396. Range is 113
There are two roles open in Public Works, both focusing on management of department programs and data collection and analysis. You do need some 2 years of office work experience and a bachelor’s in a related field to business administration, but if you’ve been doing clerical or data analysis work in a similar role for a few years it is likely that you already meet the requirements. Knowledge of public works programs would be a plus, but the way City information is collected and distributed is very similar, department-to-department - I don’t think a lack of a PW background would prevent anyone from getting an interview.
Want to apply but not sure where to start? Don’t forget we have some resume templates and hiring resources on our website, exclusive to members - check them out if you want to get a leg-up on the hiring process.
February Member’s Meeting: Our next members meeting will be on February 19th from 12-1pm at the Tempe Fire Training Center (1420 E Apache Boulevard). This meeting will have representatives from Nationwide present to do a presentation on retirement planning - if you attend this session and ask questions it will count towards your healthymetempe “Financial Wellness” incentive, which is worth 5 points (1/20th of your needed 100 points). You can rsvp here until February 12th.
Tempe IT Trainings: Tempe It is offering Microsoft and Adobe training throughout the Spring, with courses designed both for entry-level employees and those who already use those tools on a daily basis. I think nearly every employee can benefit from these courses - if you handle documents or information on a consistent basis, there are almost certainly ways to simplify some of your existing work processes and transfer information from different programs more easily. Check out the class schedule here.
Job Descriptions: Many members have noticed that their roles are still missing job descriptions - I wanted to provide some context and explain why the process is taking so long.
Back in Spring of 2025 UAEA and TSA were told by HR that job descriptions were in-progress and would be finalized shortly after the Segal study was concluded. This date was revised several times due to both a realization that the scope of the job descriptions review was much larger than they had initially thought and because departments began discovering genuine errors in the initial descriptions that needed extensive editing to fix. There were also revisions made to jobs, such as changes in range and responsibilities, that meant the descriptions needed to be further changed after initial edits to better match responsibilities of other roles in the same range. This was a fairly involved process but HR’s current goal is to have them all done this Spring.
To be completely clear, part of this delay has been because of UAEA and TSA reviewing every role after HR and individual departments have made initial edits. If we have concerns about the drafts of job descriptions that we receive, we provide that feedback to HR, which relays it to the department. If the department agrees, they make those edits, then we get to review the description again to make sure the new version properly reflects our changes. This process can take several weeks per job, and we’re usually looking at 1-5 new job descriptions from HR analysts each week.
What exactly is UAEA doing when we review jobs? Well, UAEA does not know everything about every role in the City - when we review job descriptions we’re primarily checking for 3 things.
We compare the new job description to the old job description and make sure the responsibilities and description of work are comparable. If there are multiple tiers of a role (such as a base level, a senior level, and a principal), we make sure there are clear distinctions in responsibilities of each role’s daily tasks. Our expectation is that job descriptions reflect 80-90% of the work City employees will be doing in that role on a daily basis - while there may be some overlap between different levels of a role, we expect that higher-paid employees will generally have more responsibilities or responsibilities that require a different type of skill to complete. If we know very little about the daily work of certain roles we will reach out to members and ask questions - this has helped us further differentiate similar roles in departments. We also look at other jobs in the same range and see if the work is comparable.
We check the promotional requirements for either multiple versions of a role or roles that are normal promotional paths for certain workgroups (ie, base level of a role, lead version of that role, supervisor of that role, etc). We have pushed back when we see that the education requirements of promotional paths increase considerably as you advance or if the required experience for promotions seems unreasonable (ie, the base level role requires a high-school diploma but the lead or supervisor roles suddenly require a bachelor’s degree). Our intention here is not to devalue employees who have advanced education or experience but rather to ensure employees are not unfairly restricted from interviewing in roles that they’re qualified for - it’s our contention that the best predictor of success in a job is usually whether someone has done similar work in the past, and if someone has considerable experience/knowledge in a field, we want them to at least get an interview.
Finally, we’ve been checking to ensure that the requirements of each role are reasonable based on what the work actually is. Some initial job descriptions raised the educational requirements of positions from high school diplomas to bachelor’s degrees but nothing about the roles required higher-education, some initial descriptions raised experience requirements but comparable roles in other cities had much lower requirements for their roles, and so on. This review was done partially to continue our focus on helping Tempe career employees get roles, but also so that it is easier to fill certain roles that have been chronically understaffed for years - we know that employee stress goes up when you’re covering for vacant positions and our hope is that Tempe can have reasonable hiring requirements to get as many qualified candidates in the door and hired as quickly as possible.
I hope this helps answer some questions about the review process - please let me know if you have additional questions. If you do not currently have a job description listed, please do not worry - continue doing what you’ve been doing in your daily work until you hear otherwise. I may be able to find a copy of your old job description and send it to you if you’d like something to reference - feel free to reach out if you’d like that.
Thanks for a great week, everyone!