The announcement that the EPO shall have less examining staff in 2019 caused some concern amongst examiners. The official discourse is that recruitment is halted and the number shall decrease because many examiners reach the age of pension in 2018-2019.
Märpel finds that surprising, as large numbers of staff took early retirement in the past years, but she could not see the statistics.
But Märpel could find an excel program called "Early Certainty Timeliness Simulator". Do not ask for a download: it only works within the EPO intranet. It was not designed that way for security: more simply it keeps itself up to date on statistics by downloading new ones from the internal databases: new patents filed, patents already searched, grants and withdrawals, etc…
The "Early Certainty Timeliness Simulator" computes future workload per directorate, draws a set of nice curves, etc… Märpel took some time to play with it. In most directorates, stock will reach zero within one or 2 years.
Märpel can only hope for a serious bug in that software. But if the software is right, Märpel knows why President Campinos is not too worried about difficulties in recruiting. And he is not: projections distributed to managers show no recruitment until 2024: 6 years!
2 comments:
Have you seen the latest article on techrights? Campinos is rumored to lay off 1000 examiners this year. That is 25% of the workforce!
Märpel cannot believe that the EPO would fire 25% of the staff. Besides the management is starting to realize that they have a quality problem.
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