Your report may indeed be only one of the elements taken into account when your DG prepares the draft promotion list… but the language of your appraisal will decide the fate of your appeal if you launch one for not being proposed.
Therefore your self-assessment and the evaluation by the reporting officer must very positively mirror your performance.
Your report may indeed be only one of the elements taken into account when your DG prepares the draft promotion list… but the language of your appraisal will decide the fate of your appeal if you launch one for not being proposed.
Therefore your self-assessment and the evaluation by the reporting officer must very positively mirror your performance.
First we would like to congratulate once again those of you who received their well-deserved promotion during the 2018 promotion exercise. If you were one of the promoted colleagues, then it means you were lucky not to be penalised by a leaving Head of unit, by a restructuring of your DG or by many other factors which have nothing to do with merit and performance but that often negatively influence the outcome of the promotion exercise.
Yet, even not considering those unexpected factors, year after year most of us feel the uncertainty and injustice of the Commission’s very opaque and arbitrary promotion system and, unsurprisingly, many of you have contacted us for support on their intended Article 90 complaint concerning non-promotion. To that end, we have created an Article 90 template for you to use (deadline to submit is 10 February 2019). Continue reading Promotions (Article 90)
Since Monday, you can see in Sysper whether you have been proposed for promotion this year or not.
We congratulate the colleagues proposed for promotion!
The promotion meetings between the Directors General and the staff representatives took place between 14 May – 8 June. In more than 40 meetings we took care of the interests of the post-2004 staff. From our experience and feedbacks we reached some conclusions: Continue reading Promotion exercise 2018
Every year, the promotion procedure for officials goes through several stages to culminate with the allocation of promotions. During the first stage, your DG’s hierarchy puts together draft promotion lists according to the DG quota distribution and discusses those lists with the staff representation. This first stage is now over and DG promotion lists are out! Please, consult Sysper and check if you were proposed for promotion.
If you were proposed for promotion, congratulations!!! If not, and if you believe you deserved to be promoted, then you should consider appealing as you may still get another (slim) opportunity to grasp the desired promotion. 5% of the overall promotion quotas will be attributed after all appeals have been reviewed by the Joint Promotion Committees in October.
The annual promotion decisions are taken by the Appointing Authority (AA), on the basis of 1) proposals by the senior management of each DG; 2) recommendations by a Joint Promotion Committee (JPC).
DGs and JPCs must determine who deserves a promotion on the basis of a comparison of merits (in theory…, see article below). All officials take part in the appraisal exercise. But only those who are eligible for promotion, i.e. have been in the grade for at least 2 years take part in the promotion exercise. Continue reading The promotion system for officials: How it works
Elsewhere we explain how the promotion exercise works in theory, with three levels of ‘merit comparison’ along the exercise (at directorate-general level, by the Joint Promotion Committees and their preparatory groups, and finally by the appointing authority (AIPN)) on the basis of comprehensive and unambiguous appraisals. Continue reading Reform of the promotion system
You might have been promoted this year, or not promoted… We have argued many times that the current promotion system is flawed but why is there so much uncertainty in the system? Part of the explanation lies in the so-called “wave effect”. Basically, if you are in a grade with increasing population, for instance because of the arrival of a wave of colleagues promoted from the grade below, the mathematical peculiarities of Annex IB of the staff regulations result in a temporary increase in the quota of promotions available for that grade (see Annex 1 below for a theoretical example). Conversely, if you are in a grade with decreasing population, there will at some stage be a temporary decrease in the quota of promotions available for your grade. As a result, if you are lucky to be in “growing” grade, you might be promoted quickly just because “you are riding the front of the wave”. If you are in a “shrinking” grade, you might have to wait longer than normal to get your promotion just because you are “floating” on the “tail of the wave”. Continue reading Promotions: why are some years good and some other years bad?
Dear G2004 members,
First of all, we would like once again to congratulate those (numerous) of you who received their well-deserved promotion during the 2016 promotion exercise.
You were lucky this time not to be penalised by a leaving Head of unit or restructuring of your DG or many other factors which have nothing to do with merit and performance but do influence the outcome of the procedure. Continue reading Art 90 Template – Promotion exercise 2016
The 2014 staff regulations introduced the so-called “career cap” (blocage des carrières in French). Regular ASTs and ADs who have no management responsibilities cannot reach grades above AST9 and AD12. At least in principle, see the next article on career inequalities which shows that the career cap does not apply to several thousand pre-2004 officials …
The 2014 Staff Regulations also introduced a special career path for those who are supposedly experts in their field, the so-called “senior assistant” and “senior expert” posts. Most of us know that these titles are nothing but a reward for those who have been in place for a long time, nothing to do with actual qualifications!
We have just received an update from DG HR on the number of nominations to these posts and on the resulting promotions since 1 Jan 2014.
A staggering 820 permanent officials have benefited from nominations to these high-ranking positions during the past 3 years. With the current trend, we should reach over 1000 officials in these positions before the end of this year.
Because these nominations open the way to promotions to grades beyond the AST9 and AD12 cap, we can expect that most of these lucky colleagues will reach the AST11 and the AD14 grades in a few years’ time. More than 500 of them have already benefited from promotions to AST10, AST11, AD13 or AD14 during the past 3 years.
The budgetary impact of these generosity is not public yet but a back-of-the envelope calculation suggests that it will be on the order of several million euros/year (a promotion implies a pay rise of about 13% if one neglects the steps; 13% of €10,000/month for 1000 people gives about €16 million/year; we don’t have yet access to the financial fiche of the draft General Implementation Provisions for Contract Agents, but we reckon that DG BUDG is trying to save a similar amount on the back of the Contract Agents, through for instance their downgrading at the occasion of a change of contract).
While it is encouraging to see that DG HR is becoming more transparent with this “senior something” scheme, it raises a difficult issue: how can the Commission afford to spend so much money to boost the careers of officials who are already ultra-privileged while cutting on every other possible expenses?
Don’t forget that the lucky “senior something” will not only enjoy higher salaries but they will also benefit from higher pensions since pensions are directly proportional to the last year of salary. When you consider that the pension liability had reached €57 billion at the end of 2014 (footnote 15, page 6) you start worrying, don’t you? You won’t be the only ones to be worried about the sustainability of our pension scheme, the Council is getting worried too and this is not good news for us! In particular, the Council conclusion #8 “requests that the Commission … reports … on the long-term sustainability of the EU pension scheme, taking into consideration … an evaluation of the pension accumulation rate, the staff contribution rate of 1/3 to the pension system, including for existing staff,…… and to propose appropriate policy measures … to ensure the sustainability of the scheme.“.
Read the Council’s lips: more cuts to the pension rights of “existing staff“. Most of those nominated to “senior something” posts during the past 3 years will have escaped from active service before the situation becomes unbearable (they will no longer be “existing staff“…) but those of you who have been recruited after the 2004 reform, or worse after the 2014 reform, will be targeted once again! In this context, one would expect DG HR to be more cautious with the “senior something” scheme.
