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What is job-sharing?

by Clare Brennan
Find out all about job-sharing. Could it help you achieve a better work-life balance?

Job-sharing is a way for two people to both fill one job. Each person has a permanent part-time post. They split the hours, pay, holidays and benefits between them according to how many hours they each work.

There are three main types of job-share:

  1. Shared responsibility - there is no division of duties. The job-share partners are interchangeable. This works well for jobs where the work flows continuously. It demands a high level of communication and co-ordination - and that the partners are well matched

  2. Divided responsibility - works well when work can be split into different client groups or different projects. Each partner has their own case-load or project, which they focus on during working hours. If the partners don't know each other well, this can be a suitable way to arrange the job-share

  3. Unrelated responsibility - the partners perform completely separate tasks, while working in the same department. It's rather like two part-time jobs running in tandem and fits situations where the partners have different skills

Job-sharing is becoming a way to introduce 'part-time' hours into areas where people have usually only worked full time. It's a system of working that seems to particularly suit women. In 1997, of 1,777,000 employees in job-shares, 89 per cent were women. Boots the Chemists introduced a formal job-share scheme in 1988. At that time, only seven per cent of women staff came back to work after maternity leave. By 1997 this had risen to 77 per cent.

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