Originally Posted by Unregistered

Lazy to quote all the posts above...so just giving a general response based on personal observations.

The aggressive cutting of headcount is not only by drastically reducing recruitment, but also by "enticing" or "forcing" people to leave. Extremely competitive requirements for fresh grads to be shortlisted and chosen...hence in a way packaging the career to be a "golden" or "hard-to-get" opportunity. Pushing people out with overwhelming workload and "encouraging lifelong learning" with external work attachments - hence encouraging current officers to do a career switch.

Why do all these? A guess would be to get rid of the top-heavy officers at the salary ceilings or management level. Another aggressive ongoing method is to drag out the career pathways of younger officers with slow promotions through a variety of means - "grooming" for a few years before being allowed an official appointment, or "need to wait/queue for your turn".

Will KPs or SLs try to manage headcount within the school? The above mentioned points about headcount is already affecting all schools, hence it is more of a policy issue. This means that at the school level, even the hands of higher management are probably tied. Their temporary solution would be to try and hire FAJT or RT, but there is still a limit. Many schools have already hit the quota of 10 for the whole school.

Some of us have probably only witnessed changes when the situation gets extreme. Some HOD or SL will only start panicking when many people of the same department mass quit or leave. Even this emcare feedback may not work since it just gets rerouted back to higher management. It is probably more for parents' usage (i.e. complaints). So the only thing emcare does is to expose your complaint more clearly to the KPs and SLs, and depending on how your school culture is like, you may or may not be " blacklisted" somehow.

Observations of temporary stop gap measures by some schools:
1. Merge 2 challenging/low ability/chaotic classes into 1 - reduce requirement for 1 officer. Rinse and repeat across all levels. Even class sizes of near 50 for an immensely challenging group is not unheard of.
2. Long term relief by current dept officers, but not by a fixed person - meaning, for that particular lesson, there is always a different teacher coming in to teach ("spread out teaching load")
3. Last min search and ask for FAJT or RT and plonk that person to plug all gaps. By the way, not all SLs like FAJTs...for various reasons which are better left undisclosed.

Again, these are just personal observations and info gathered from others. Some may concur, some may object...but as to whether the situation is really favorable (especially for the current young officers), I think the question is rather rhetorical.