Job scheduling is performed using job schedulers. Job schedulers are programs that enable scheduling and, at times, track computer "batch" jobs, or units of work like the operation of a payroll program. Job schedulers have the ability to start and control jobs automatically by running prepared job-control-language statements or by means of similar communication with a human operator. Generally, the present-day job schedulers include a graphical user interface (GUI) along with a single point of control.

Organizations wishing to automate unrelated IT workload could also use more sophisticated attributes from a job scheduler, for example:

• Real-time scheduling in accordance with external, unforeseen events
• Automated restart and recovery in case of failures
• Notifying the operations personnel
• Generating reports of incidents
• Audit trails meant for regulation compliance purposes

In-house developers can write these advanced capabilities; however, these are usually offered by providers who are experts in systems-management software.

In scheduling, many different schemes are used to determine which specific job to run. Some parameters that may be considered are as follows:

• Job priority
• Availability of computing resource
• License key if the job is utilizing a licensed software
• Execution time assigned to the user
• Number of parallel jobs permitted for a user
• Projected execution time
• Elapsed execution time
• Presence of peripheral devices
• Number of cases of prescribed events