Just wondering what you think about the progression routes for RSEs? A big problem as I see it is that someone not in the first wave of RSEs (who are now mostl

Just wondering what you think about the progression routes for RSEs? A big problem as I see it is that someone not in the first wave of RSEs (who are now mostly in leadership positions across the various research intensive Universities groups) basically gets stuck with no appreciable career growth. You can probably get to a permanent job in the 42-50k salary band as a “Senior RSE”, which seems to be used for people even without that much experience to try and bump up the salary, but beyond that it would be very difficult to jump to the band above without staying in the same role for ~5+ years and hoping that someone left. At that point you’re obviously at top of automatic increment band and don’t get a meaningful pay rise for a potentially number of years. I thought it was very unlikely that there would more jobs at that level because when bidding for time on grants, academics don’t want to pay someone external to their team more than they pay their own post docs, and heard comments to that effect from academics themselves. For centrally funded positions it’s even harder, having seen my old group lead battling to try and get even 32-40k positions approved. So in my mind, there’s a big problem where someone ambitious could job hop into an easier and better paid job in industry. Why wait a really long time to get promoted when you could leave and get paid more than the top of the next salary band anyway?