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My department at work is going through a restructuring process and new titles are being created. As I navigate this process, I am running up against some questions that I have found to be more of a technical nature and difficult to find any guidance on.
Here is the question. Are any of you aware of guidance, or could you provide your own thoughts, on when to use the word "of" and when to use the word "for" in job titles? For example, should it be the Dean of Student Conduct or Dean for Student Conduct? Director of Disability Services or Director for Disability Services? Vice President of Business Affairs or Vice President for Business Affairs?
If you don't have anything, no worries as that seems to be par for the course :-). However, given all of the knowledge on this forum, I didn't know if someone out there is aware of any best practices or at least some logical explanation on how to approach job titles. Thank you!
This is just a quick point (maybe wrong or maybe right). It seems to me that if the organization chart calls a department "Business Affairs" then the title should be "Vice President of Business Affairs". Rather, if the department is called "Office of the Vice President for Business Affairs" then the "for" works.
BTW, POTUS (President Of The United States) and SCOTUS both use "of".
Welcome Andrew. That's an interesting question, and I'll give it a shot. Bottom line though ... it probably doesn't make a heckuva lot of difference. I've seen both forms used. To whatever extent possible, you should probably consider using whatever you choose consistently across the organization.
My first take was that "for" should be used instead of "of" when the job function relates more to providing direct services. Examples: Director for Admissions, Secretary for Student Loans, Assistant for Job Placement.
Compare that to: Director of Overseas Operations, Secretary of Commerce, Dean of Students.
Then I started second-guessing myself, thinking that both those words are more or less interchangeable in job titles. Even though they have different dictionary definitions, those definitions overlap where the meaning is "a preposition indicating connection or association".
I did find this interesting discussion about functional titles vs. descriptive titles, but it didn't really get to the heart of your question.
So then I checked Google Ngrams and found this interesting result for "director of" vs. "director for". Use of the preposition "of" seems to be the clear winner in terms of usage throughout the Google corpus. A check of "secretary of" vs. "secretary for" gives similar results.
If I were you, I think I'd go with the majority usage and stick with "of" for your job titles.
I think I would rather employ a Vice President Of Ethics Violations than a Vice President For Ethics Violations.
The Smother Brother used to have a joke in their act about teaching young wome about right and wrong. We're dividing the job between the ywo of us; my brother will teach them right, and I wikll teach them wrong.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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