Internal competitions were presented last year by Vice-President Sefcovic [2] as an initial response to the divergence between pre and post – 2004 careers. What is our assessment now that the competition is over?
Generation 2004 has looked in details at the results of the AD9 competition. The analysis of other competitions will follow. The first finding, not surprisingly, is that cabinet members, together with several temporary agents (TAs) that have a link to DG HR (most of whom coincidentally hail from a specific Member State) represent about a quarter of the laureates.
Another interesting finding is that many of the laureates have some management responsibilities (team leaders, heads of sector, deputy heads of unit, assistants to a DG) or are in charge of sensitive files (e.g. 10 laureates from DG COMP).
As a result, only about 1/3 of the laureates have the profile of typical post-2004 “foot soldiers”.
An additional piece of information is that a significant number of laureates were already AD8 with a number of years of seniority. Indeed, 5 laureates have just been promoted to AD9 this year via the normal, annual promotion exercise, so the competition will bring no benefit to them in terms of career progression. Another 2 laureates passed a competition at a higher grade (one at AD10 and one at AD12), so having passed the AD9 competition is of no use to them. Thus, all in all, 7 laureates out of 60 – i.e. close to 20% of all laureates – will gain nothing from having passed the AD9 competition! Hardly something to support DG HR’s claim that this internal competition was intended to help post-2004 officials. Since it could be that DG HR has subtracted all 60 promotions from the quota of normal, annual promotions allocated to AD9 (the so-called “cannibalisation” process where the receiving grade “pays” for the promotion of laureates through a reduction in the normal, annual quota) the net effect of the AD9 internal competition could very well be that 7 promotions less than what would have been normally awarded were given to AD9s this year. Generation 2004 has formally requested several clarifications from DG HR concerning these issues (see “clarification on internal competitions here [3]).
Preliminary results suggest that the same problem occurred with the AD7 and AD8 competitions. Surprisingly, some laureates passed both the AD8 and the AD9 competition.
On average, laureates will have gained about 2.7 years in their career progression, assuming that they would have progressed according to the rates specified in the staff regulations without the competition.
To summarise, the vast majority of laureates are undoubtedly deserving officials who merit this (limited) acceleration in their career. However, apart from the parachutees, only about 20 “foot soldiers” and roughly another 20 high performers advanced their careers by less than 3 years, out of a population of roughly 2,300 AD7/AD8s. This can hardly be interpreted as a remedy to the shortcomings of the 2004 reform.
The only way to make these internal competitions useful for post-2004 colleagues would be to run them on a wide scale, prevent parachutages [4], prevent duplication of promotions and make sure that they are not financed via “cannibalism” – i.e. stolen from the normal annual promotions within the respective grades.
(see also p.2-3 here [5])