What Is a Job Title? Two Words Doing Several Jobs at Once
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A job title is supposed to say what somebody does. It also signals seniority, sets expectations inside and outside the organisation, affects pay comparisons and future employability, and occasionally carries legal weight, and those purposes pull in different directions often enough that titles routinely stop describing the work.
The several functions
A title does at least five things simultaneously and they conflict. It describes the role, which is its ostensible purpose. It locates the holder in a hierarchy, so that colleagues and outsiders know who decides what. It signals status, both to the holder and to anyone they deal with, which is why titles are used as non-monetary compensation. It supports comparison, since pay benchmarking, recruitment and career progression all depend on matching roles across organisations, and a title that nobody outside the company understands makes its holder harder to hire. And it may carry legal or professional meaning, since certain titles are protected and cannot be used without qualification. Those functions pull apart. A descriptive title may signal low status. A status-raising title may mislead about authority. A title optimised for internal hierarchy may be unrecognisable externally, which is a real cost to employees that organisations frequently do not bear. The result is that titles drift towards signalling and away from description over time, which is called title inflation and is well documented.
Where the words come from
Many familiar titles carry histories that explain their otherwise odd form:
- •Manager, from the Italian for handling a horse, which retains an implication of control over something that would otherwise go its own way
- •Clerk, from cleric, since literacy in medieval Europe was largely confined to those in religious orders, and the person who could write was by definition a churchman
- •Secretary, from the keeper of secrets, originally a position of considerable confidence and authority before it was reassigned and downgraded
- •Chancellor, from the official who stood at the lattice screen separating a Roman court from the public
- •Marshal and constable, both originally concerned with horses and stables, which rose to command positions because that is where power sat
- •Chief executive, chief financial and the whole family of chief officer titles, which are a twentieth-century American export now used almost everywhere
Inflation and its opposite
Titles ratchet upward because promotion without a pay rise is cheap and because customer-facing staff benefit from titles that suggest authority. The pattern is well documented in banking, where vice president titles became widespread at levels far below executive responsibility, and in sales and consulting. Research has found that inflated titles do affect how people are perceived and how they perform, with some evidence that they reduce turnover and increase satisfaction at low cost, and countervailing evidence that widespread inflation devalues the currency and confuses external comparison. The opposite movement exists too. Some organisations have flattened or abolished titles, describing people by function or team, which is intended to reduce status distinctions and encourage challenge, and which tends to run into the problem that hierarchy reappears informally and becomes less legible rather than less real. Deliberately playful titles in technology and creative firms sit somewhere between, functioning as culture signals while creating real difficulties for the holder when they apply for their next job.
When the title is regulated
Some titles are protected by law or by professional bodies, meaning it is an offence to use them without the relevant qualification and registration. The protected set typically includes medical practitioners, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, dentists, veterinary surgeons, solicitors and barristers, architects, and in many jurisdictions engineers, and the regulation exists because the public cannot assess competence directly and relies on the title as a guarantee. What is protected varies enormously between countries, and engineer is the clearest case, since it is strictly protected in several European and North American jurisdictions and used freely in Britain for roles with no formal qualification, which is a long-running grievance within the profession. Related protections cover the use of certain words in company names and the implication of registration. A separate category concerns titles with statutory duties attached, including company director, data protection officer and various safety roles, where accepting the title accepts personal legal responsibility, which is a fact that people appointed to such roles are not always told clearly.
The takeaway
The words must describe the role, place it in a hierarchy, signal status, allow comparison across employers and sometimes carry legal weight, and those purposes conflict. Status functions win over time, which is title inflation, and a title nobody outside the company understands costs the employee rather than the employer. Clerk comes from cleric because the literate person was a churchman, and manager from handling a horse.