Employment Date, Months and Years

Employment Date (XX:EMPDATE) is a computer generated field based on the effective date of the initial appointment transaction for your faculty, staff and students. This field is available in most of the CIRS files containing employment history data, and is frequently used in reports to identify the length of time an employee has been at a particular campus.

Two related fields are available in the AC, EH and SAC files: Employment Months (XX:EMPMTHS) and Employment Years (XX:EMPYEARS). Both fields are calculated as whole numbers using the file creation date. If you would like to modify the define to use a different date and/or usage format, refer to the examples below:

To use a different date for the calculation of the months employed, define the new date in the same format as XX:EMPDATE (i.e., month, day, year). In the example below, the DATEDIFF function is used to determine the number of months lapsed between the two dates:

MYDATE/MDY = '01012004';

MONTHS/I6 = DATEDIF(XX:EMPDATE,MYDATE,'M');

To determine the number of years with a decimal place instead of a whole number, specify a packed decimal format (e.g., P8.2) and subtract the older date from most recent date and divide by 365:

MYDATE/MDY = '01012004';

YEARS/p8.2 = (mydate - XX:EMPDATE)/365;

For more information on date functions and defining fields, refer to your FOCUS documentation.