Originally Posted by Unregistered

Yes. It happened in 1986.

New graduates entering the civil service in 1986 had to start at 2 incremental points below their colleagues of 1 year seniority. In other words, the newly employed graduates fell 3 years behind in terms of pay to those who started work in 1985. All because of the poor economy back then.

The 1986 graduating batch who joined the CS had it quite bad compared with the earlier cohorts. Those earlier graduates who went on to gain masters degrees had a further 2 increments, while the 86 batch got no such increment when they earned their masters or even PhDs.

The only way for them to catch up was through promotion. But looking at the bigger picture, those who got employed in the CS in 1986 were counting themselves lucky because unemployment was quite bad then.