Middle-level civil servants, among them doctors and engineers, will be the biggest winners in a new pay structure. The Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) has created a new grading system which will be implemented in the next Budget cycle.
The new structure follows a job evaluation exercise for five sectors in the public service. The new system will see some employees promoted and given higher pay. Others will be demoted in line with their ranking in grade. But those demoted in grading will not have their salaries reduced but instead will miss out on subsequent salary increments.
Under the new system to be effected from July 1 next year, civil servants will be classified between Grades A up to Grade E. The lowest grade will be A and the highest E. It will further be broken down into A1, A2, A3 among others.
“There are positions that were overvalued and will be coming down. There are those that will gain because their positions will be moving higher,” SRC Chairperson Sarah Serem told The Standard.
Salaries for employees whose positions will not change will remain the same. Mrs Serem explained that the new pay will be implemented at the start of the next financial year when Treasury is expected to have factored in the increment in the budget.
“We have come up with a grading structure that harmonises the functions across the public sector. The structure looks at the worth of every position and it will be the basis upon which we will determine the pay,” she said.
Mrs Serem explained that professionals and middle-level employees will be the biggest winners of the job-evaluation exercise given that their jobs were the most undervalued. The exercise will also recognise how long it takes to acquire a specific qualification. For example, it will grade a graduate whose degree takes five years higher than the one whose degree takes four years.
This will see doctors and engineers join the public service at a higher grade than their counterparts who studied humanities. Those who have attained additional qualifications on the job may not necessarily benefit since the pay will only be based on the skill required to do a particular job and not the extra qualifications earned by the employee. The Government currently has about 700,000 public officers on its payroll who share the Ksh627 billion wage bill annually.
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