There was something I recall that happened just before I joined up in the 80's. I'm not sure of the full details, so standing by for correction, but: my first DO at Sultan had been promoted SD officer under a scheme where several WO's were offered temporary commissions. I think that some of the red tape had been put aside to achieve this, to what extent I don't know. But I imagine that a lot of the CW nonsense (organising summer fairs etc etc) had been binned from the process. To me that can only be a good thing. If they offer promotions to WO's who then prove good enough and like life in the weirdroom let them get on with it. Save money on retention bonuses and may even keep in a few WO's too with hope of further promotion. Not this call sign though!!
Ah, you'll be talking about the 'tassles' then! Certain fine specimens, who had to be WOs, were offered the rank of Temporary Acting Sub Lueitenant (TASL). There were supposed to be no Officer pension rights and no advancement past Sub/Lt........
As I recall, that eventually went out the window and most if not all made full Lt in the end.
Staning by to be corrected on the finer points, but that is basically it.
For submariners, Jan Purchase was one...............
But we have plenty of trained and skilled engineers as senior chiefs and WO2s, who are more than capable of stepping up into the wardroom, blows that argument out of the water, it's always been a class thing, they will not allow an engineering officer cadre completely compromised of ex ratings. No bounty required for CPO to go to BRNC.
More or less mate.
There is currently a shortage of graduate engineers across industry as a whole, so to attract people into the RN role they are paid a 'joining bounty' once they finish training (and locked into the RoS) IIRC.
The RN has to remain competitive with industry in this area or we will not have the engineering officers for the future (as I said before, they really should think about an RN Engineering College ... hang on a minute :shock: )
EDIT TO ADD: Caveat, a proper recruiting professional will no doubt be able to give the full ins and outs of the offer details.
But we can't recruit PWOs direct (which was my point regarding engineers), AFAIK there isn't a PWO degree offered by any civilian university for civilian candidates (happy to be proven wrong) :wink: