The Operations job family group manages the essential day-to-day functions that keep the University running smoothly. These roles focus on maintaining facilities, optimizing logistical processes, and ensuring that UVA’s physical environments are safe, functional, and welcoming for all who learn, work, and visit here.
If you'd like assistance in charting your career path, Career Navigation is here to provide guidance and support.
A Job Family is a specialty area within a broader field of work. It groups together roles that require similar skill sets, knowledge, and abilities. While a Job Family Group covers a wide professional category—like Operations—a Job Family narrows it down to a specific focus, such as events and venue and the recycling. This structure helps clarify the types of work being done and supports clearer career development pathways.
These roles are responsible for maintaining cleanliness and hygiene standards across university buildings. Custodians ensure that the hospital, classrooms, offices, dormitories, and public spaces are clean, safe, and well-maintained for students, faculty, staff, and guests.
These roles are responsible for coordinating, planning, and executing events across grounds and/or off-site venues. They manage logistics, scheduling, setup, and teardown, ensuring that university events run smoothly and meet the needs of organizers, attendees, and external partners.
These roles are responsible for preparing and serving food in dining facilities, ensuring the delivery of high-quality, nutritious meals. They oversee daily operations, menu planning, sanitation, and customer service to create a welcoming dining experience.
These roles are responsible for managing the university’s supplies and materials, including ordering, storing, and distributing items across departments. They monitor stock levels, track assets, and ensure that essential materials are available when needed.
These roles are responsible for maintaining the outdoor spaces and grounds of the university. Landscape staff manage planting, mowing, trimming, and irrigation to ensure a beautiful, safe, and sustainable environment for faculty, students, staff, and visitors.
These roles are responsible for handling and distributing university mail and packages. Mailroom staff manage incoming and outgoing deliveries, ensure timely distribution, and coordinate with postal services and internal departments to meet communication and logistical needs.
These roles are responsible for providing printing, copying, and binding services for university departments, students, and staff. Printing staff ensure high-quality production of documents, flyers, posters, and other materials while maintaining equipment and managing requests efficiently.
These roles are responsible for overseeing university buildings and facilities, including leasing, maintenance, and tenant relations. Property managers ensure that UVA properties are well-maintained, safe, and compliant with regulations, while also handling space allocation and usage.
These roles are responsible for managing the university’s recycling programs, promoting sustainability by ensuring that recyclable materials are properly collected, sorted, and processed. Recycling staff work to reduce waste, educate the community on sustainable practices, and support environmental goals.
These roles are responsible for operating and managing retail services, such as bookstores, apparel shops, and convenience stores. Retail staff ensure smooth operations, manage inventory, assist customers, and support university merchandising and brand identity.
These roles are responsible for managing transportation services, including shuttles, parking facilities, and vehicle maintenance. Transportation staff ensure that students, staff, and visitors have safe, efficient, and reliable options for navigating the grounds and surrounding areas. Responsible for analyzing parking and transportation needs, enforcing parking rules and regulations, issuing parking permit and managing transportation fleet. Includes specialized roles related to air travel.
These roles are responsible for managing and overseeing the day-to-day functions that support the university’s physical and logistical needs across multiple areas of service.
A career stream is a category in the Career Journeys Job Framework that describes the general type of responsibilities a position has. It reflects the nature of the work—such as professional, clinical, operational, managerial, or executive—and helps clarify the kind of contribution the role makes to the University. Career streams, combined with job families, help employees understand how their work fits into the organization and identify potential paths for growth, whether within the same stream or by moving to another.
Career Streams in Career Journeys Job Framework Include:
Yes — you can move from one career stream to another if your job responsibilities change and align with the new stream.
For example, someone in the Operations and Service stream could move into the Professional stream by gaining the necessary education, training, or experience, or into the Management stream by taking on people-leadership responsibilities. Career streams aren’t fixed for life—they’re a way of describing your current role, not limiting your future opportunities
No — you don’t have to become a manager to reach the top of your career stream.
In Career Journeys, each stream has its own progression path. For example, in the Professional or Clinical Professional streams, you can advance in roles in a higher "level" that carry significant increases in influence, responsibility, and compensation without managing people.
Management is just one type of career stream, not the “top” of all streams. You can build a high-level career without shifting into people leadership—unless that’s the direction you want to go.
Levels reflect the typical knowledge, skills, and experience needed for roles at that stage. Within a career stream, several different jobs may share the same level, and not every level will always have an active position in every stream.
The differences between career levels are determined based on the scope/complexity of the position. Specifically, this means the jobs within a job family will differ in level based on duty and responsibility differences between profiles. Factors include the nature and scope of influence, the level of autonomy the position has to make decisions at various levels of impact, the nature of communication and audience, supervisory responsibilities and number/type of teams, and the level of expertise needed to fulfill position responsibilities.
Yes — you can move to a different job family group or job family if you apply for and are selected for a position in that area.
For example:
You might move from the Information Technology job family group into Finance if you gain relevant skills or education and are hired into a finance role.
Or you could shift from the Digital Media job family to Graphic Design within the Communications job family group if your work focus changes.
It’s not an automatic change — it happens when your role and responsibilities align with the requirements of the new job family group or job family, and you successfully secure that position through UVA’s traditional hiring process.
If most of a position’s responsibilities fall within one functional area, the position is assigned to the matching job family group or job family. If the work is more evenly spread across different areas, the job family group or job family is chosen based on which set of duties would be most important to highlight when recruiting for the role.
Faculty and student positions are not included in the Career Journeys Job Framework. However, they still receive a unique job profile and can use Career Journeys to explore jobs that are part of the framework.
Other positions not included are: Classified Staff, Temporary Employees, Professional Research Staff, Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs), Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), Student Workers, Residents and House Staff, UVA Physicians Group, and UVA Community Health.
To be classified in the management stream, a job’s main focus needs to be leading people. In most cases, this means supervising at least two team members and overseeing a distinct department as a core part of the role.
We welcome all employees to take some time to explore the Career Journeys Job Framework and get familiar with its key concepts before requesting more information or changes to their job profile. For example, it is good to know that your job profile title may not always match the business title you use every day, and supervising one employee does not automatically place a role in the management stream before reaching out.
You can learn more about your job profile and how it relates to other roles by reviewing the Job Framework resources on this page and on the training webpage. If, after doing so, you’d still like to know more about your classification, please email askhr@virginia.edu with a brief description of your questions and any relevant details. Our HR team will review your message and connect you with the right person to guide you through the next steps for understanding—or, if appropriate, reevaluating—your job profile.
If you have more questions, there are plenty of resources to help. Your manager is a great first stop, and you can also email HR for assistance. If your questions are about your personal career path, consider scheduling a meeting with Career Navigation.
Learn More about Career NavigationExplore your Career Journeys details and jobs in your Job Family
Access Your DashboardWhether you want to learn how to use the Dashboard or navigate the Job Directory, create a new Job Requisition, or understand how Career Journeys affects specific operations in your area, this page serves as your go-to guide.
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