Post by Antoine DelacroixHi,
EPO claims to recruit many patent examiners. It is often stated on
the recruitment website that the salary is "attractive", "competitive", at
a "similar level to those of other international organisations". This is
all very vague...
It is vague because the EPO management does not wish to publish its salary
scale. WIPO, for example, used to publish the grade and salary range of
the job offers it had going (I don't know whether that is still the case).
I suspect that the reason initially was political, because the national
offices may have feared (generally unfoundedly) that they would lose
valuable staff. Why the EPO today still does not make public its salary
scale is beyond me. If you go to the EPO library and see the job
announcements there you will be informed of the grade at which the post is
offered, e.g. A6 for a member of the Board of Appeal, A5 for a Director's
Post. Examiner's grades range from A1 to A4, and the pay scale is indexed
to the grade system. The grade you obtain upon entry is dependent on your
prior experience, but prior law experience working as an attorney is only
counted at "half-value", i.e. the EPO will only take into account half of
the time you spent in the law firm as experience when assessing your
starting grade. Bear in mind that this policy may have changed.
As for salaries in general, yes they are good, even compared to the UK,
Germany or France. They are in addition essentially tax free, because an
internal tax is levvied by the by the EPO on your salary, such that you
don't essentially have to worry about income tax. The pay cited by Regis
is less than what I started on at the EPO with no prior experience, i.e.
straight out of university, so I can only assume that pay has been reduced
slightly since then, or that the pay scale has been revised. However, you
also get extra pay for your marital state, or depending on the number of
children you have, or whether they need special care. As Regis also
mentioned, you get paid home leave every 2 years (10 days, plus
travelling time to your place of original residence if in one of the
contracting states), and if memory serves me well, a part of the
travel cost for the home leave is also paid for by the EPO.
In all, the package is very comprehensive. To give you an example, when I
left the EPO to work in France, I took a 30% drop in salary, and on top of
that had to pay income tax, so from a financial viewpoint it was quite
important, but there were other motivations involved than just salary. I'm
still earning less today than most of my friends still at the EPO, but
that doesn't bother me, and I certainly don't regret having worked there,
but I probably wouldn't go back again. Apart from living and working in a
country which isn't your "own", so to speak (not that it bothers me, I'm
English and working in France), there is the spousal unit and possibly
children (if you have any) to consider. Integration into society is not
necessarily very easy for the other partner, especially when that person
doesn't speak the local language, and peer pressure and the social
structure (e.g. absence of full day child care, early schooling, etc), in
some of the countries where the EPO has an office represent an additional
difficulty for spouses to find work. I know many spouses of EPO
employees who are unhappy with their life, but many will stay for the
monetary aspect. As they say, "Money can't buy happiness. Basically, you
have to consider all the pros and cons. A lot of single people I knew from
the EPO have mostly married other people from the EPO, which I suppose is
statistically fairly obvious given the population and the environment.
wurzel