HR Glossary

Approving Authority – Same as hiring authority (see below).

At will – these are the types of contracts used for faculty outside of the tenure/tenure- track line and for professional exempt staff.  Lecturer contracts generally have termination dates but other at will contracts do not (its what we used to call indeterminate contracts).

Faculty – on the Downtown campus, faculty include Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor, Instructor, and Senior Instructor.

On the Anschutz Medical Campus campus they also have faculty in the Clinical Teaching Track line, the Clinical Line and the Research Line.  For example you can have an Assistant Professor, Clinical Teaching Track or a Clinical Associate Professor or Research Full Professor.

Hiring Authority – The dean is the hiring authority for the college.  He/she must
approve job offers and the letters of offer come from the Dean’s office for everything except student employees and lecturers.  If Departments vary in the compensation offered to lecturers, they must get approval from the dean’s office.

Invoice – Invoices can only be accepted from people outside the University. 

Job Code – each job title (e.g., lecturer, instructor, program assistant) has a job code.  This code is recorded in PeopleSoft and links to benefits to associate the correct benefit with the correct job type.  You will sometimes here reference to a job code series because related jobs have job codes that are similar to each other.  For example, instructors, senior instructors, and tenure/tenure-track faculty are in the 1100 series (1101, 1102 etc).

Job Class – type of employee the person holding the job is (classified staff, exempt staff, faculty).

Letter of Offer – this the contract.  Letters of offers for student employees and lecturers are done at the department level, all other letters of offer (PRA, tenure/tenure-track faculty, instructors/senior instructors and staff) come from the dean’s office.

Position Number – The number assigned to a job search in PeopleSoft and associated
with the individual hired into that position.  Position numbers can be reused (if the person leaves but the job still remains, we can reuse the position number).  Note, this is not the same as the Posting Number used in Jobs at CU to track applications to a job.

Posting Number – the number assigned to the job posting during a search in Jobs at CU.  Note, this is not the same as the Position Number in PeopleSoft, which continues to be associated with the specific position and person hired into after the search is completed.

Primary Unit – Primary Unit can refer to either the college or the department depending on the context in which it is used.  They use the same term for both because some colleges/schools do not have departments.

Requisition –

Tenure – on the Downtown campus you must be in the tenure track line to receive tenure and you are promoted to Associate Professor upon receipt. On the Anschutz Medical Campus, you can be any of the titles in the tenure/tenure track line and not have tenure.  The school of medicine will refer to these as ‘indeterminate’ contracts but HR does not like that term.