CLs the unit of work is the job. A job consists of one (or several) steps, each of which is a request to run one specific program. For example before the days of relational databases a job to produce a printed report for management might consist of the following steps: a user-written program to select the appropriate records and copy them to a temporary file; sort the temporary file into the required order, usually using a general-purpose utility; a user-written program to present the information in a way that is easy for the end-users to read and includes other useful information such as sub-totals