Originally Posted by
Deliverance
Alfred,
Nice reasoned argument you presented there. It beggars belief that in this day and age officers are paid purely according to rank. I cannot think of any commercial organisation that would manage the pay bill in such a fashion.
But let's stick with age old stereotypes eh? Frankly, I don't care what others think of me.
Being controversial, I suspect that the official response would be along the lines of we recruit officers first and train them to be specialists second, and that as officers rather than specialists it warrants a common pay spine. Yes, some skills probably have a greater market value than others and I know the Institute of Employment Studies did a think piece recently for the AFPRB suggesting that such market value needs to be taken in to account more.
Indeed, if one were to look at it purely from an external market perspective, on the back of that study one might look at your average airline pilot at EJ, BA etc and ask whether that as a purely technical skill and with no requirement for your average airline pilot to have done a commissioning course before taking up their first right hand seat, whether pilots need to be officers at all? Could they be NCOs in pay band 4 with a minority being commissioned over time into leadership and management positions? I know a good few airline pilots who went straight down the civilian route and have no formal leadership or management training and yet are still good pilots despite not having been officers.
It's certainly not a simple issue, and although emotive, and I don't think it will become any less complex as we move gradually from the traditional views of 'air power' to 'aerospace' power, including the growing use of unmanned systems over the coming years and decades. Frankly, give it a few decades and you'll probably find its the spotty 19 year old who dreams in binary and can read code like we read the papers is going to be the next generation of high market value warrior rather than the sporty one with high functioning motor skills.