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, with the goals of providing employees with greater incentives to improve skills and petencies and giving management a more versatile workforce. Generally, employees are paid to acquire higher skills in their own field or lateral ones in related fields. From a systems standpoint, job descriptions, job evaluation plans and jobbased salary surveys are replaced by skill profiles, skill evaluation plans and skillbased salary surveys. The disappearance of the traditional job provides the primary rationale for this change. Today, employees are said to have variable and unstable work assignments , with roles that cannot be assigned a valid pay rate in traditional job evaluation plans . Contentious Tes The main tes of skillbased pay (SBP) conflict with mainstream business thinking. The first te is that pay should be based only on skills, taking the value of an employee’s work to an anization out of the pay equation. In effect, SBP advocates are asking pensation professionals to set the same pay rate for employees, based on their skills, even though they might have substantially different duties and responsibilities and make substantially different contributions to a firm’s success. The omission of something of fundamental value to the firm makes the concept a hard sell with managers and employees. In recent years, pensation experts have affirmed the value of work as an essential part of the pay equation. The second te is the notion that pay should be based on how many skills employees have or how many jobs they potentially can do , not on the job they currently hold . Here again, SBP advocates make what many firms consider an unreasonable request. They introduce a controversial pay for potential concept that directly contradicts the pay for performance concept pensation professionals have diligently strived to establish. In recent years, emphasis has been on what employees actually acplish on the job, rather than on static concepts relating to who they are, such as their management potential or length of service. Also, by asking firms to pay employees for a job that they might perform in the future, SBP is a practice few firms could afford. With these core beliefs, SBP has experienced an uphill battle for acceptance as the primary means to determine base pay. Questionable Assumption The SBP concept rests on a questionable assumption that a job does not reflect the skills of the person required to do it. That makes job evaluation plans an inappropriate method for evaluating skills and setting pay rates. According to SBP advocates, skills must be valued by using marketbased skill surveys. They overlook the fact that most pointfactor job evaluation plans award the bulk of their points for the possession and application of knowledge, skills and abilities. On this point, Lawler has stated ,“In many cases , this ( skillbased pay ) will not produce dramatically different pay rates than are produced by paying for the nature of the job . After all, the skills that people have usually match reasonably well the jobs that they are doing.” Also overlooked is the fact that many occupations (., accountant, electrician and actuary) do reflect the skills required to perform them。 when sa