by 2012_cohort » Thu Sep 03, 2015 10:32 pm
It really depends on your agency. At my agency, cohorts before mine were being hired during the agency's "years of plenty" and were auto-promoted yearly until they reached their target. So (for instance) you got hired with a MS as a 9, then the next you were 10, the next you were 11, and so forth until you reached your target.
But I got hired as the bottom fell out of the budget, and they instituted promotion quotas. So I was hired as a PhD as an 11 with a 13 target, my supervisors thought my work was great and rated me "must promote", and like almost everyone else I was not in fact promoted two years running.
So no, it's not guaranteed. This isn't a SMART problem, it's a government problem. There's tons of new employees in my agency in the exact same situation, and only a tiny percentage of them were hired through SMART. And I will say I really do like my job a lot. It's a fantastic place to work except for the terrible pay and promotion problems.
It really depends on your agency. At my agency, cohorts before mine were being hired during the agency's "years of plenty" and were auto-promoted yearly until they reached their target. So (for instance) you got hired with a MS as a 9, then the next you were 10, the next you were 11, and so forth until you reached your target.
But I got hired as the bottom fell out of the budget, and they instituted promotion quotas. So I was hired as a PhD as an 11 with a 13 target, my supervisors thought my work was great and rated me "must promote", and like almost everyone else I was not in fact promoted two years running.
So no, it's not guaranteed. This isn't a SMART problem, it's a government problem. There's tons of new employees in my agency in the exact same situation, and only a tiny percentage of them were hired through SMART. And I will say I really do like my job a lot. It's a fantastic place to work except for the terrible pay and promotion problems.