One key aspect of the Defense Department’s revised personnel
system will be how it will apply its authority to create
pay banding arrangements, in which several standard GS
grades are combined and managers will have additional
authority to set starting salaries and increase pay of
subordinates for performance or other reasons.
The starting point is a compilation of “best practices”
gleaned from demonstration projects that include pay
banding, most notably the China Lake, Calif., facility
that introduced pay banding into the federal vocabulary
two decades ago. Under a draft DoD policy, jobs would be
divided into four main “career groups”-science and
engineering research, professional and administrative
management, engineering, scientific and medical support,
business and administrative support. A fifth, much
smaller one, would be for the college cooperative
education program.
Under the draft policy, there would be four levels in
each group except for science and engineering research,
which would have only three levels-in part because there
are no positions in that group below GS-5. In the
professional and administrative management career group,
the four levels would be GS 5-11, GS 12-13, GS 14-15,
and above GS-15.
However, the plans apparently remain subject to change,
either in terms of how many levels would be used or
precisely which grades would be in which level.