The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

The GS pay scale is the standard go-to pay scale for US government employees.

Lab Demo is an alternative that provides more flexibility in setting employee pay. It is intended to help the government recruit and retain workers in more competitive fields of work, especially valued workers. Under a lab demo system, there are fewer but wider pay bands, which tends to allow your pay to increase faster than on a GS scale, but exact setup of lab demo raises, bonuses, and performance evaluation varies by government organization.

While usually the flexibility of the lab demo pay scale is good for employees (it was created to recruit and retain them, after all), it is conceivable this added flexibility could be detrimental, if your organization undervalues your work there.

Yes, it does.

That is the "normal path" for engineers in our facility. SMART scholars are given the accelerated 10-11-12, with 6 months to get 11 and a year later for 12. We give special preference and paypools (this is related to performance evaluations) for SMART scholars.

In GS Scale you also earn a raise each year along a step (unless changing grade due to ladder). So once you hit 12, you would be a 12-1, a year later 12-2, etc. In LabDemo you are given a performance evaluation and a raise+bonus. For your consideration, my bonus for this year was $3500 and my raise was 3.2% (separate from the general raise). Early on GS may give better raises, since the amount is usually flat per step, but after step 3 or 4, it is 2 years per step increase, and at 8 or so, it takes 3 years.

So a raise of 3.2% was almost the same as a step increase, but I also 1) Got a bonus and 2) when it gets to 2-3 years per step increase, our system pays off much faster.

malarious wrote: ↑

Sun Jul 23, 2023 12:43 am

Sorry for the delay in someone replying.

The bad news is: This depends on facility and may be tied to it.

Generally you should qualify for GS-7 at a minimum, but usually higher. You are also likely to be put on a ladder, so you get regular promotions early on.

In my facility we do a 10-11-12, taking 18 months to reach 12. That is on Lab Demo, but not all DB scales may do that.

I heard some facilities do gs 7-9-11-12 LD equivalent, but there is a year in between each level. Does this seem right?

Sorry for the delay in someone replying.

The bad news is: This depends on facility and may be tied to it.

Generally you should qualify for GS-7 at a minimum, but usually higher. You are also likely to be put on a ladder, so you get regular promotions early on.

In my facility we do a 10-11-12, taking 18 months to reach 12. That is on Lab Demo, but not all DB scales may do that.

What's the difference in pay for the Lab Demo payscale and the GS payscale? Is it all that much more?