New public servants planning a rapid career rise face a slower journey than past recruits and will need to fight harder for each promotion.
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The latest Australian Public Service workforce data suggests the phenomenon of "classification creep" – gradually hiring people at higher-paid levels to do similar work – has ended.
The proportion of bureaucrats employed as middle managers and subject-matter experts (EL1s and EL2s) fell slightly over the past year. It was the first time the ranks of executive-level officers shrank since the current job classifications came into effect in 1999.
During the 2000s, when promotion opportunities were plentiful, many graduate public servants were confident of becoming EL officers within a few years of entering the service.
However, the director of public sector recruitment at Hays, Kathy Kostyrko, says "we're in a different time now".
"Eight to 10 years ago, there was a skills shortage in senior ranks and an expectation among graduates that they would move up quickly because there were gaps at the senior levels," she said.
"That's not the case now. The current senior staff are very skilled and the graduates coming in will have a much slower road."
In 2007, almost one in eight graduates were promoted to an APS6 or higher-level role immediately after their first year. Two even became EL2 officers.
However, just over one in 40 of last year's graduates won an APS6 job, while none entered the EL ranks. Most were promoted to APS4 positions.
Earlier this year, the national commission of audit, chaired by businessman Tony Shepherd, sharply criticised the number of APS staff employed in EL roles, saying "mid-level managers have comparatively few people reporting directly to them".
It suggested that EL officers' "spans of control" – the number of staff who report to them – tended to be about half the size of what it regarded as "best practice".
"High-performing organisations generally have fewer layers of employee classification and wider spans of control," the commission's report said.
Ms Kostyrko agreed that some past graduates had climbed too quickly into top roles.
"Some senior people were saying about them 'there's a lot of brains there but no substance'. We had people in EL1 and 2 levels supervising people much older than them and often more experienced than them," she said.
"Organisations were doing this because they wanted to retain those staff. There were some brilliant young graduates but, generally speaking, when you come out of university you really are green.
"You need time and opportunities to learn, to make mistakes and to build a career on strong foundations.
"Young people promoted to APS6 and EL1 roles would come to us asking 'I want to keep going up, how do I do it?' and we'd need to say 'you simply don't have the skills and knowledge'. And, of course, they wouldn't like that very much."
However, Ms Kostyrko said agencies should be allowed to employ specialists at higher levels regardless of whether they supervised staff, because government pay compared poorly with the private sector.
"Once you get to the EL levels, the salaries are just not competitive. If you need a highly skilled engineer and the private sector will pay $40,000 a year more, how can a government agency possibly match that if they really need those skills?"
The median base salary of an EL1 officer is about $108,000 a year, while an EL2's is about $134,000.