The union has held a meeting with the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform about the future of the administrative officer (AO) grade. The meeting is the latest activity in a union campaign that seeks to address the issues identified by members of the grade.

The union outreach to AOs identified several issues, including a lack of clarity over the purpose of the grade, concerns over career progression opportunities, different approaches by different departments about the deployment of the grade, and a lack of clarity on what is meant by the term ‘graduate recruitment’. 

As part of the outreach, which has been underway throughout 2022 and 2023, the union found that there were at least four different understandings of the purpose of the grade. In some departments, recruits were being deployed to policy and analysis work, similar to the work that was traditionally undertaken by the grade.

In other departments, the AO was seen as completely interchangeable with the grade of higher executive officer (HEO), which is problematic because of the pay differential between the grades and the different competencies attaching to each grade. 

The third category of AO definition relates to departments that are somewhere between these two points. The final category relates to AOs who are recruited with specialist academic backgrounds but who do not have a career pathway associated with the specialism. 

The grade was originally introduced before the foundation of the State and was, at the time, seen as a ‘cadetship’ of sorts for the assistant principal (AP) grade, guaranteeing that at least some APs at the time would have third level qualifications. 

Once an AO came through their ‘cadetship’ period, they automatically became APs, a situation that ended approximately 20 years ago. In relation to the ‘graduate’ nature of the role, the union found that there was a difference between advertising a post as ‘graduate entry’ versus ‘graduate development’. 

A large number of AOs believed that they were going to be developed as public service policy analysts. However, they also felt that any guidance given on this was rarely related to the actual work being carried out on the ground. The ratio of AOs to other grades has increased exponentially in recent years. 

Traditionally, when compared to the HEO role, for every seven HEOs in the civil service there was approximately one AO. Now, however, there is approximately one AO for every 4.5 HEOs. The increase in AOs is partially attributed to the fact that the moratorium in the austerity years did not largely apply to the grade and some departments used the availability of the grade to fill critical vacancies that they could not otherwise fill.

This has contributed to the lack of clarity in different departments on what the grade can and should be used for. Fórsa recognises that there is a series of issues to be remedied in relation to graduate recruitment to the civil service and the definition and deployment of the AO grade. 

The research was well received by the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform and there is an appetite to engage on this issue. Isabella De Luca, an Administrative Officer on the Divisional Executive Committee and Chair of Fórsa Youth said that it is “encouraging that DPER have acknowledged that there are fundamental issues” with the structure of the AO grade. 

“We hope to continue this engagement to secure a commitment from DPER to undertake a meaningful review of how graduate recruitment is managed in the civil service. There is no simple solution, but it is important to highlight the long-standing concerns of our AO members with regards to pay, career development and progression, particularly with a view to ending the practice of interchangeability with other grades,” she said.  

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