Public Sector, promotion is mainly a combination of being matey with managers and being confident. The actual ability within the job isn’t relevant, because anything the incompetent person can’t do gets delegated to the poor sods below who are stressed out and overworked.
I’ve seen employees that spend 50% of their time on training/conferences to ‘develop’, 25% of their time in meetings where all they do is either hang back and pretend to be absorbing or put forward stupid ideas that others are then forced to implement, and the remaining 25% chatting about their personal lives and making themselves cups of coffee…and these are the people who are first in line for promotions.
I’ve also seen restructures happen during a recruitment freeze where for example the department has been told to knock £100k off their budget…but due to leaving posts vacant when people left throughout the year, they actually already are running £150k under their book value of their budget…so they use the restructure as a means of deleting roles and ringfencing them onto higher grades to give their 5 favourites a £10k pay rise each…then announce their restructure was a success as it’s ‘saved’ £100k…without acknowledging that the posts that were already empty were causing some people to be overworked…what they do is delete those empty posts, shuffle the teams around and give managers new ‘responsibilities’ to justify their grade increases, and then close the gap in duties not covered by just adding it in under ‘any other duties’ and ‘role not changed more than 10% so we don’t need to reevaluate’…to add that extra work formally onto people who aren’t getting paid extra in acknowledgement for it.
As a specific example, I’ve had a manger who got an upgrade due to having responsibly for department performance reporting added to their role. But…they didn’t know how to build/create reports and manipulate data, didn’t understand basic statistics….so ALL of that work was delegated onto me, which I was already doing anyway, even though it wasn’t in my role profile. The only change being that instead of distributing performance data myself, I then had to email the reports first to this manager, who then copied them into a fresh email and sent them out themselves….making it appear they were doing the work. The crazy thing is that the senior managers KNEW I did that work before promoting this manager to take responsibility for it, and were happy with what I did and happy for me to continue doing the work in the background. The real reason the manager got the upgrade was that their partner was very high up in another department and was frequently in meetings with the upper manager of my department. I then got told I wasn’t being a ‘team player’ when I suggested that I should just be doing the technical part of pulling data from the system on request, and the promoted person should be doing analysis, report writing and also making any suggestions for any new datasets needed or process changes…seeing as all of that was now listed clearly in their role profile.
I’ve also seen someone get put on day release for a uni course immediately after starting, when others have been been on a waiting list (as they only allowed 1 person per year due to funding), because they had a parent that was a local politician.
I would think public sector (excluding roles with very specific performance requirements such as doctors and nurses) are all generally like this. How well you do in terms of promotion is much more about how much managers like you or how well connected you are, rather than anything related to performance.
Often managers have huge amounts of responsibility listed to warrant their £55k salaries, but when you look at what they actually do…the vast majority of it is just having 1-2-1s with the staff who actually do the work and getting confirmation from them that everything is running smoothly, or taking ideas from those staff to senior meetings. They wouldn’t know how to do any of the things they are listed as responsible for.