It seems that Stalin has been employed in the capacity of 'calculator-observer' in the Tbilisi Physical Observatory. This position was a kind of an entry-level job for a prospective researcher and chiefly consisted of checking the indications of the devices (including variometers measuring the Earth's magnetic field), noting them down and making calculations required for plotting the results or providing reports that were later processed by the actual meteorologists and other scholars working there.

In other words, this was clerical rather than scientific position, and thus it was accessible for a person with a finished secondary education and several years of college under one's belt. Iosif's school records are preserved, and according to Simon Sebag Montefiore, he was an excellent student in high school and a very good one in seminary, until he apparently decided to focus on revolutionary activity, neglecting his religious education. Nevertheless, being an intelligent, young man with good grades in high school and college mathematics he was eligible for most types of clerical work at the time. Please note that many observers-computers were commonly hired by various organizations requiring large numbers of repeatable calculations for the constantly changing data, such as physical and astronomical observatories or scientific laboratories, and such positions were commonly staffed with high-school graduates (or liberal arts college graduates, such as Antonia Maury), of which the 'Harvard computers', a group of women performing such work in Harvard Observatory and headed by Edward Charles Pickering between 1877 and 1919 (meaning they were contemporary to Stalin's short tenure in the Tbilisi observatory).

Sebag Montefiore, S., Young Stalin. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2008.