A Closer Look at UW’s “Business and Financial Operations” Workforce Data

The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is the U.S. Department of Education’s standardized data-collection system for colleges and universities. Among many data points, it includes employee reporting by broad occupational category. Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes provide the federal framework for classifying detailed occupations according to the primary type of work performed. Institutions use these detailed codes to support aggregation into the broader occupational categories used in IPEDS reporting. 

Because institutions organize work and define positions differently, the federal categories do not create conditions to conduct a perfect apples-to-apples comparison between data submitted by different institutions. Two universities may assign similar work to different job titles, units, or occupational codes. The data is useful for understanding the broad composition of an institution’s workforce, but it should not be treated by itself as proof that one institution has more or fewer employees in a given area of work than another.

“Business and Financial Operations” is one of several IPEDS occupational classifications used to describe the work performed across institutions; other categories include education, research and technical work, health care, management, office support, and facilities and service functions.

UW’s 2024-25 IPEDS submission reflected a workforce of approximately 4,500 employees in the category labeled “Business and Financial Operations”. Importantly, this figure does not include employees in the UW Medicine health system as IPEDS is primarily focused on data reporting associated with the academy. 

At face value the label may suggest the figure is a count of UW Finance staff, but it encompasses a much broader swath of the workforce - including project management specialists, research coordinators, academic services professionals, fundraisers, compliance officers, and human resources staff assigned throughout the University. Understanding what is included in this category and where these functions lie is essential to interpreting the number responsibly and considering how it can inform UW’s Operational Excellence work.

What the Category Includes

UW maps its job profiles to the federal Standard Occupational Classification system for federal reporting. The system groups jobs by the primary type of work performed, which allows institutions to report workforce data using a structured set of occupational categories. At UW, this broad category includes positions such as project management specialists, budget analysts, and compliance officers.

SOC codes have a hierarchical structure: a broad occupational group contains detailed occupations, each identified by a code. For example, the broad Business and Financial Operations group includes occupations such as Project Management Specialists (SOC 13-1082), Budget Analysts (SOC 13-2031), and Compliance Officers (SOC 13-1041). UW job profiles are mapped to these standard occupations for reporting purposes, allowing the data to be compared using a common classification.

A SOC code describes the general type of work assigned to a position, but it does not identify the UW department where the work occurs, distinguish central from unit-based roles, reflect a position’s funding source or workload, or capture every responsibility performed by an individual employee. The same SOC occupation can therefore include positions across many UW units, with different job profiles and levels of responsibility.

At UW, the category of Business and Financial Operations includes 14 SOC occupations and 206 distinct job profiles, representing employees across a variety of functional responsibilities ranging from financial analysts to research coordinators. The table below combines the SOC occupations with a plain-language view of the UW job profiles and key functions commonly represented in each grouping. Examples are illustrative, rather than a complete list of every profile mapped to each SOC occupation.

Business and Financial Operations roles are assigned across more than 35 business units across all three UW campuses.

The School of Medicine has the largest concentration of employees in this grouping, with 1,675 employees, or 37.0% of the University-wide total. This does not mean that 1,675 people perform finance work. The figure includes roles supporting clinical and academic programs, sponsored research, compliance, financial analysis, and program operations across UW’s largest and most complex academic unit. 

Finance, Planning & Budgeting (FPB) accounts for 191 employees in this reporting year, or 4.2% of the University-wide category. The rest of this workforce is distributed across schools, colleges, research and service organizations, other central units, and the Bothell and Tacoma campuses.

Using this data as an input to UW Operational Excellence program

These figures offer a perspective on where work is organizationally assigned. They do not, by themselves, show the internal distribution of responsibilities within a unit or the service relationships, or quality, among central offices, schools, departments, research programs, and clinical operations.

The breadth of the category further may help contextualize the size of the reported figure, but it does not establish whether every administrative process these positions support or are involved in are optimally designed. Answering that question requires examining the work itself: what services are provided, who uses them, where responsibilities overlap, how processes perform, and whether technology or shared approaches could improve results. 

This is work the UW is undertaking as part of the Operational Excellence program. Examining functions and services alongside workforce data can reveal opportunities to reduce administrative burden, clarify responsibilities, improve handoffs, strengthen shared tools and processes, and make services easier to access.