Would you qualify to keep the journalism job you have, if your skills were inputted into a spreadsheet and compared with your coworkers?
Unions representing journalists at Ten – an Australian broadcaster – say the company wants to get more than 100 workers off the payroll. These are mostly union jobs, which typically means you start hacking at the bottom and stop when you’ve hit the magic number.
But Ten has found another way – it’s created a checklist it uses to rate its employees to make it easier to keep top performers around while getting rid of those who haven’t broadened their skills over the years.
Score high – keep your job. It’s called the Network Ten Selection Matrix.
Journalists can achieve a score in each category of 1-4 – one means “does not meet requirements” and four means “exceeds requirements.” The document is below, so no need to rehash every measurement. But some of them include desktop editing, leadership skills, developing story ideas, level of stories assigned and local and national exposure.
Good time to find a couple of stories, motivate your co-worker to work on the feature you were talking about the other day and update that Twitter account.