Sketchy at best for a subsidiary of Ministry of Law
Pros
2 days WFH Bonus generally match Government Sector Colleges are generally nice KPI is almost entirely based of number of cases completed (might be a con) "Retirement home" job
Cons
Extremely sketchy since day 1. Contract full of loopholes and exploits that upper management can use. Advertised as full time job but in the contract is stated as contract. Only after 9 months of probation, which can extend to 1 year, then treated as full time staff. Almost immediately after starting, new ranking scheme was introduced that increased KPI requirements accross the board and shortened the runway for new staff to match senior staff output by half the time. Previously, new staff were guaranteed a promotion after roughly a year when meeting previous KPI goals. Now, the goal is roughly 25% higher and getting promoted instantly increases the bar by another 25%, effectively increasing the requirements to over 50% from the previous batches or "risk being marked down" for appraisal and ranking. Upper management extremely defensive and deflect most concerns. 3 months of intensive training, which is fine. However, directives when actually working on live cases differs. Now the actually negatives. Do NOT bother applying if you have a background in biology. I cannot speak for other divisions but the division leader for division 1 biotechnology and medical devices is manipulative and impulsive. During probation, our goal is to learn through mentorship of senior examiners how to approach cases strategically, but we are still expected to hit a set KPI target. This inflow of cases is controlled entirety by division leads. For almost 2 months, I did not recieve any cases, which completely goes against the objectives of the probation and caused an extension in my probation. This is not only limited to me, as others also recieved extensions to their probation without proper justification. Feedback given during the mentoring process is also phrased in very obscure questions and can be very sarcastic. When asking further questions about certain comments given, it is treated as if their comments are common sense and not to be elaborated. Division approach to cases also seems contradictory to training. My appraisal was also filled with defamatory statements such as stating I did not pay attention and put in effort during training even though he was not there and my peers and trainers would testify otherwise. When bringing this up to upper management, some of these statements were retracted but again most of my concerns were deflected. Well, what can you expect if you privatise a governing body for IP?
