To take this further with HR?

[Pearce30]

Hoping there may be some HR experts who can provide advice here.

I work for a university and my role is specifically funded by an external grant (not by the university).

Will try to be brief - essentially I am applying to go up to the next salary grade on the basis that my job duties have grown massively as have my skills / experience / knowledge. The funder and my managers are happy with this.

However I still have to get approval from the Uni to go up a band. I’ve applied for this in January and have still not had any formal response!

During this time I have chased the administrator several times and been told she is booking another ‘chat’ with HR. Then about a month ago when I saw her in person she told me it was not likely to be approved but couldn’t really say why and has still not sent any formal feedback.

From what I can gather, the whole process has been the administrator and one HR rep discussing this informally despite neither of them being part of my role or project. My manager has not once been contacted about this and neither have I.

I think it is important to note that the administrator is the same band as me currently and so potentially could be biased about me going to a band higher than her …. They also advised me of the wrong application process initially and then delayed telling me this for about 8 weeks. We are also friendly and talk about personal things like possible future mat leave etc.

I feel the whole process has been completely unprofessional, informal, and possibly impacted by bias / conflicts of interest and want to take this higher in HR.

Would this be unreasonable?

Would recommend getting the lead academic involved in your project to email on your behalf asking for prompt action

And the Head of Department. And Dean if necessary. I've been the admin getting stonewalled by HR in a similar case, but they decided to listen when the big gun academics followed it up. Insulting, but effective. The researcher got the raise.

Definitely a follow up email.

Have you followed a formal process of 'applying' or have you just emailed to ask?

Is there an existing mechanism for someone in your type of role to be elevated to a higher grade, or is someone going to have to write a new job description and get it formally graded by HR?

Normally it should be your line manager trying to push this forward with HR. Find out what the process is for regrading a job and then get your line manager to follow it.

Thanks all. I followed the process as I was advised but it has felt extremely informal and unprofessional …

The role needs to be formally regraded by HR but it was up to me and my line manager to update the job spec and submit. My line manager has said they are happy to support me in a HR meeting about this although they don’t like to ‘rock the boat’ too much so it will have to be me following up and organising this. Don’t think they realise that if this doesn’t get approved I will 100% be looking for a new job as otherwise there is just no opportunity to progress for the next 5 years!

Appreciate everyone’s input thank you.

Can you get hold of a jd for the grade above? Our research ones were generic templates for each grade that you'd then tweak to the position, so that might be helpful to get it moving. Supervisors often would rather be presented with something to tweak than to start from scratch in my experience, same as the jds.

I would happily have sent a researcher the basic template to work on if I'd discussed it with the supervisor and knew the funding was in place.

YA a bit BU. It’s unlikely your post is 100% funded from external sources, the university will have supplied some match funding/overheads.

Universities are obliged to ensure jobs are consistent with HERA. It’s a tortuous, overly bureaucratic and frankly unhelpful approach but it’s what they have agreed nationally with unions. Growing a role in the way that you have described is always tricky to deal with. It could mean the project was badly conceived if they didn’t describe/grade the jobs correctly. Creating a higher grade job throws up questions around fair recruitment for example.

Having said all that, it does sound like they haven’t dealt well with the process. You have two options, one is to raise a formal complaint, the other is to abandon it and approach the problem another way, for example asking for a personal value supplement.

Or, get a new, better paid job.