# Introduction - Designations

Job titles as a shared list, and how they differ from departments and from roles.

**Video coming soon:** A tour of Designations: a flat list of job titles, and the two things people confuse them with.

A designation is what somebody does. It is a flat, organisation-wide list, shared across every department, and a person holds exactly one at a time.

![The Designations screen, headed Designations above the line Manage job titles and designations, with a Central Warehouse location picker and a blue Add Designation button. Filter chips read All Status and All Sizes. The table has columns Designation, Description, Employees and Status, and lists thirteen titles including Accounts Assistant, Engineering Manager, Managing Director, Quality Inspector, Warehouse Operative and Workshop Technician, each with a green Active chip.](https://www.sorviai.com/help/worklink/designations/designations-list.png)

*Thirteen titles, alphabetical. The Employees column is how many people currently hold each.*

## Three things that are easy to confuse

Worklink keeps these separate on purpose, and each answers a different question about a person.

- **Designation** (what they do): Their job title. Warehouse Operative, Workshop Technician, Finance Manager. One per person, from this shared list.
- **Department** (who they sit with): The team they belong to. It scopes reports and routes approvals, and somebody can be in more than one.
- **Role** (what they can see): Their Worklink permissions, set under Users and Roles. Nothing about a job title grants access to anything.

> **Note:**
>
> **A designation grants no permissions**
>
> Calling somebody Operations Manager does not let them approve leave or open the records list. Access comes from their role, which is configured separately and deliberately kept apart from job titles.

## What a row holds

![Rows of the Designations table. Accounts Assistant is described as Sales and purchase ledger processing with one employee. Engineering Manager leads the workshop and field service engineering teams. Managing Director carries board-level responsibility for the Ironvale group. Quality Inspector covers goods-in inspection and BS/EN conformity checks. Warehouse Operative covers picking, packing and put-away with two employees. Every row shows a green Active chip.](https://www.sorviai.com/help/worklink/designations/designation-rows.png)

*A description on every row. It is what stops two similar titles being used interchangeably.*

*Columns on the Designations list*

> **Tip:**
>
> **Keep the list shorter than you think you need**
>
> A designation per person defeats the purpose: the column stops being groupable and reports built on it say nothing. Titles should describe a job several people could hold.