U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt.

United States Office of Personnel Management

Operating Manual

Qualification Standards for General Schedule Positions

Individual Occupational Requirements for

GS-440:    Genetics Series

The text below is extracted verbatim from Section IV-B of the Operating Manual for Qualification Standards for General Schedule Positions (p.IV-B-63), but contains minor edits to conform to web-page requirements.

Use these individual occupational requirements in conjunction with the "Group Coverage Qualification Standard for Professional and Scientific Positions."

Basic Requirements: Degree: genetics; or one of the basic biological sciences that included at least 9 semester hours in genetics.

Graduate Education: Genetics, or a curriculum or pattern of training that placed major emphasis on genetics. Graduate study in related fields such as agronomy, horticulture, animal, dairy, or poultry husbandry, entomology, microbiology, plant pathology, chemistry, molecular and cellular biology, and physiology that involved cross-training in genetics is qualifying, provided it placed sufficient emphasis on genetics.

Evaluation of Education: Most students in the field take graduate work because specific training in genetics may be limited at the undergraduate level. Under these circumstances, it may be necessary to evaluate undergraduate course work in genetics in one of two ways, as described below, to determine whether or not it is qualifying.

  1. Courses dealing with genetics, some phase of genetics, or specific techniques that are applied in genetics work are acceptable. This includes courses in genetics, plant or animal genetics, molecular and cellular biology, mathematics and statistics (as they apply to genetics), population dynamics, and certain techniques such as those dealing with irradiation.
  2. Course work consisting of an appropriate combination of basic courses in genetics and cytology or statistics are also acceptable.

Updated 06 November 1998