A job dictionary is a structured, evidence-based record of what a job physically and cognitively demands of the worker who performs it. It should document a range of features such as postures, forces, movements, sensory requirements, mental load, and environmental conditions of each job, then express them in objective, measurable terms. Used well, a job dictionary should sit at the centre of connected disciplines including work health and safety risk management, fair and lawful recruitment, injury management and return to work.
The term is sometimes treated as interchangeable with a job demands analysis or a physical demands analysis, and in practice the documents likely overlap. What unites them is a shift away from describing a job in general terms and towards measuring what it requires of the body and mind. That distinction carries real weight. It shapes whether an organisation can decide soundly that a candidate is able to perform a role safely, whether an injured worker can return to suitable duties, and whether a control measure is genuinely reducing musculoskeletal risk.
This guide sets out what a job dictionary contains, why it matters under Australian WHS and anti-discrimination law, how a sound one is developed, and where the common failure points lie.
What is a job dictionary?
A job dictionary is a compiled set of role-level demands profiles for the positions within an organisation. Each job profile breaks a role down into its constituent tasks and records the demands of those tasks objectively, drawing on direct workplace observation and measurement rather than assumption.
It is not a job description, and the difference matters because a job description typically defines duties, reporting lines, and classification for the purposes of recruitment and remuneration. A job dictionary asks a narrower, more direct question: what does this role require a person to do, how often, for how long, and under what conditions?
Across Australian occupational health practice, the document goes by several names. Job demands analysis is the most common, often abbreviated to JDA. Physical demands analysis is used where the focus is primarily physical and environmental. Job task analysis describes the underlying method. The labels differ; the purpose is consistent but each should aim to produce an objective profile of role demands that can be matched against a person’s functional capacity.
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What a job dictionary contains
A thorough job dictionary captures far more than lifting and carrying. A well-constructed profile addresses several categories of demand.
- Physical demands. Lifting, lowering, pushing, pulling, and carrying loads, recorded with the weight or force involved and the frequency across a shift. Postural tolerances such as standing, sitting, bending, kneeling, reaching, and working overhead are documented, along with grip strength and manual dexterity requirements.
- Sensory demands. Vision, including near, far, colour, and depth perception, together with hearing and communication requirements that the role depends on.
- Cognitive and psychological demands. Concentration, decision-making, time pressure, exposure to distressing material, and the overall mental load that the role places on a worker.
- Environmental conditions. Heat, cold, noise, vibration, dust, confined spaces, work at height, and exposure to hazardous substances.
- Equipment, tools, and personal protective equipment. What the worker must operate, wear, or handle to perform the role safely.
Many job dictionaries summarise the overall physical effort of a role using an established classification. The five-level scale of sedentary, light, medium, heavy, and very heavy work, drawn from the United States Department of Labor’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles, remains widely applied in Australian assessment practice. The level is determined by the weight handled and how frequently it is handled across the working day. Shift patterns and rest breaks are factored into that judgement, because demand is a function of duration as much as load.
Job dictionaries and the primary duty of care
Under section 19 of the model Work Health and Safety Act 2011, enacted in each harmonised jurisdiction, a person conducting a business or undertaking (a PCBU) must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers. The duty is expressed in materially similar terms in Victoria through the employer duty in section 21 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic).
Hazardous manual tasks are among the most common sources of workplace injury, and they are specifically regulated. Regulation 60 of the model Work Health and Safety Regulations requires a PCBU to manage risks to health and safety relating to a musculoskeletal disorder associated with a hazardous manual task. The accompanying Hazardous Manual Tasks Code of Practice identifies the factors that make a task hazardous, including repetitive or sustained force, high or sudden force, repetitive movement, sustained or awkward posture, and exposure to vibration. In Victoria, manual handling is regulated separately under the Occupational Health and Safety Regulations 2017 (Vic).
A job dictionary supports these duties directly by breaking each role into its tasks and quantifying the forces, postures, and frequencies involved, it surfaces manual handling risks that a generic risk assessment can miss. It gives the organisation an objective baseline against which to test whether controls are working. It also records the analysis in a form that withstands scrutiny if a regulator or a court later asks how the risk was assessed.
Matching the worker to the work
One of the most valuable uses of a job dictionary is in pre-employment, or more accurately pre-placement, functional assessment. The profile defines the physical and functional demands of the role. A candidate can then be assessed against those specific demands, rather than against a generic fitness test that may bear little relationship to the work.
Timing and relevance matter, for fairness and for legal defensibility alike. Better practice is to conduct a functional assessment after a conditional offer of employment has been made, and to test only against demands that are genuinely part of the role. An assessment that screens for capacities the job does not require is both poor science and a discrimination risk.
Used this way, a job dictionary helps an organisation make hiring decisions that are objective, consistent, and tied to the real requirements of the work. It also gives prospective workers a clear picture of what the role will demand of them before they accept it.
Injury management, suitable duties, and return to work
When a worker is injured, a job dictionary becomes a practical tool for recovery and return to work. A treating practitioner can compare the worker’s current functional capacity against the documented demands of the pre-injury role, and identify which duties are within reach and which are not yet safe.
That comparison underpins suitable duties planning. Rather than guessing at what an injured worker can safely do, the organisation can build a graduated return-to-work plan from objective role data, selecting or modifying tasks that match current capacity. Australian return-to-work obligations differ by jurisdiction, and several impose time-bound duties on employers to provide suitable or pre-injury employment. A current job dictionary makes those obligations easier to meet, because the suitable duties have already been mapped.
Inherent requirements and discrimination risks
Job dictionaries can operate in a legally sensitive areas in that the same document that helps an organisation make sound, defensible decisions can, if misused in appropriately, expose the organisation to a discrimination claim. The distinction lies in how the document is built and how it is applied within the organisation.
Australian anti-discrimination and workplace law protects people from being treated unfavourably because of disability. Section 15 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) makes discrimination in employment unlawful. Section 351 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) prohibits an employer from taking adverse action against an employee or prospective employee because of physical or mental disability, among other protected attributes.
Both regimes recognise a narrow exception. Under section 21A of the Disability Discrimination Act, it is not unlawful to discriminate against a person if, because of their disability, they would be unable to carry out the inherent requirements of the particular work, even after reasonable adjustments are made. The Fair Work Act contains a parallel exception at section 351(2)(b) for action taken because of the inherent requirements of the particular position.
The concept of inherent requirements is therefore central, and it has a settled legal meaning. In X v Commonwealth [1999] HCA 63; (1999) 200 CLR 177, the High Court accepted that the inherent requirements of a position are its essential characteristics, not every requirement that might attach to it.
This is where a job dictionary earns its place in the legal analysis. A well-constructed profile, grounded in observation and measurement, helps an organisation distinguish the inherent requirements of a role from incidental tasks that could be reassigned or performed differently. It also documents the evidence base for a decision, which matters because the employer carries the onus of establishing the inherent requirements exception if a decision is challenged. A job dictionary does not, on its own, justify excluding a person from work. It informs a careful, individualised assessment that considers reasonable adjustments and the particular circumstances of the person concerned.
How a sound job dictionary is developed
A defensible job dictionary is built on direct evidence, not desk research. The method follows a consistent path.
A suitably qualified assessor, commonly an occupational therapist, physiotherapist, or exercise physiologist, attends the workplace. The assessor reviews existing job descriptions and procedures, interviews workers and supervisors who know the role, and observes the tasks being performed. Physical demands are measured rather than estimated, using load weights, force readings, and frequency counts taken on site. Shift structures and rest breaks are recorded so that demand is assessed across a realistic working day.
Consultation is not optional under WHS law. Sections 47 to 49 of the model Work Health and Safety Act 2011 require a PCBU to consult, so far as is reasonably practicable, with workers who are or are likely to be directly affected by a health and safety matter. Workers who perform a role hold knowledge that no document captures on its own. Involving them improves both the accuracy and the credibility of the analysis.
The draft profile is then validated, ideally by the workers and supervisors who contributed to it, before it is finalised and recorded in the job dictionary.
What separates a defensible job dictionary from a risky one
Not every document badged as a job dictionary will hold up when it matters. Several markers distinguish a credible profile from a liability.
- Measured, not assumed. Demands are quantified from on-site observation, not copied from a template or estimated from memory.
- Role-specific. The profile reflects the actual role at the actual workplace, including its equipment and environment, rather than a generic occupational title.
- Current. Roles change as equipment, processes, and layouts change. A profile that is years out of date may describe a job that no longer exists.
- Consultative. Workers and supervisors have contributed to the content and confirmed that it is accurate.
- Complete. Psychological and cognitive demands are addressed alongside the physical, which matters as psychosocial risk obligations continue to mature across Australian jurisdictions.
The most common failure is the generic template applied without site verification. A profile that has never been tested against the real job can misstate demands in either direction. It may screen out capable candidates, or it may understate a genuine hazard. Both outcomes carry consequences.
Job dictionaries in safety-critical roles
In safety-critical work, the demands of a role extend to medical fitness for duty, and job dictionaries connect to formal health assessment standards.
Heavy vehicle driving is the clearest example. Commercial driver medical standards are set out in Assessing Fitness to Drive, the nationally agreed medical standards published jointly by Austroads and the National Transport Commission. The current 2022 edition took effect on 22 June 2022, and a review of that edition is underway, with submissions open until 17 July 2026. In rail, the National Standard for Health Assessment of Rail Safety Workers, published by the National Transport Commission, performs a comparable function for rail safety workers. Its current edition took effect on 11 November 2024.
For roles of this kind, a job dictionary and a fitness-for-duty health assessment work together. The job dictionary defines the functional and environmental demands of the role. The health standard governs the medical conditions that bear on safe performance. Read together, they give an organisation a defensible, role-specific basis for managing fitness for duty in positions where impairment can carry serious consequences.
How Safetysure approaches job dictionaries
Safetysure treats a job dictionary as a foundational document rather than a standalone deliverable. Done properly, a job dictionary will feed an organisation’s manual handling risk assessments, its recruitment and pre-placement screening, its injury management and return-to-work planning, and its defence of inherent-requirements decisions. We recommend developing job dictionaries through on-site analysis, building them around measured demands, and integrating them with the wider safety management system rather than treating them as a one-off compliance task.
Where psychosocial and cognitive demands are significant, we recommend that these be assessed with the same rigour as physical demands, and that any pre-placement or functional assessment be conducted by an appropriately qualified professional.
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Frequently asked questions
Is a job dictionary the same as a job description? No. A job description sets out duties, reporting lines, and classification. A job dictionary records the measured physical, sensory, cognitive, and environmental demands of a role, so that a person’s capacity can be matched to the role’s requirements.
Who should prepare a job dictionary? A suitably qualified assessor, such as an occupational therapist, physiotherapist, or exercise physiologist, working on site and in consultation with the workers and supervisors who know the role.
Are job dictionaries a legal requirement? There is no standalone law requiring a document called a job dictionary. However, the WHS duty to manage hazardous manual task risks, the obligation to consult workers, and the need to make lawful, evidence-based decisions about inherent requirements together make a well-developed job dictionary a practical means of meeting legal obligations.
How often should a job dictionary be reviewed? A profile should be reviewed whenever the role changes in a way that affects its demands, for example through new equipment, processes, or workplace layout, and periodically in any case to confirm that it remains current.
References
Austroads and National Transport Commission (2022) Assessing fitness to drive 2022: medical standards for licensing and clinical management guidelines, Austroads, Sydney, viewed 20 June 2026, https://austroads.gov.au/drivers-and-vehicles/assessing-fitness-to-drive.
Australian Human Rights Commission (n.d.) Your rights as an employee under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth), Australian Human Rights Commission, viewed 20 June 2026, https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/disability-rights/employee-rights-under-disability-discrimination-act.
Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth), viewed 20 June 2026, https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A04426.
Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), viewed 20 June 2026, https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2009A00028.
National Transport Commission (2024) National standard for health assessment of rail safety workers (2024 edition, effective 11 November 2024), National Transport Commission, Melbourne, viewed 20 June 2026, https://www.ntc.gov.au/codes-and-guidelines/national-standard-health-assessment-rail-safety-workers.
Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic), viewed 20 June 2026, https://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/in-force/acts/occupational-health-and-safety-act-2004.
Safe Work Australia (n.d.) Model Code of Practice: Hazardous manual tasks, Safe Work Australia, Canberra, viewed 20 June 2026, https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/doc/model-code-practice-hazardous-manual-tasks.
Safe Work Australia (n.d.) Model WHS laws (model Work Health and Safety Act 2011 and model Work Health and Safety Regulations), Safe Work Australia, Canberra, viewed 20 June 2026, https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/law-and-regulation/model-whs-laws.
United States Department of Labor (1991) Dictionary of occupational titles, 4th edn (revised), United States Department of Labor, Washington DC.
X v Commonwealth [1999] HCA 63; (1999) 200 CLR 177.