Pros
Interesting job – you’re likely to work on a wide variety of technologies. Good salary. Supportive team environment and excellent training provided during the initial 2-year training period and beyond. You have the opportunity to study for a diploma in IP law once promoted to examiner. Flexible working – you can work any time between 5 am and 10 pm on weekdays (subject to agreement with your line manager). Home working (usually up to 3 days per week) available following promotion from associate to examiner. Other benefits (including special and office-wide bonuses, subsidised childcare, development opportunities).
Cons
Output – the performance of examiners is determined predominantly by their quality of work (e.g. their written reports) and their output (i.e. the number of cases they process). For output, a numerical value is given to each examiner at the end of every month, which is determined by the number and difficulty of the patent applications that they have completed. While some people may easily reach their output objective, which increases the longer an examiner has been at the Office, others struggle greatly in doing this. For the latter group, this can make the job very stressful, result in a poor work/life balance, and be a major barrier to promotion. Supervision – each associate is assigned a supervisor, often a senior examiner, who reviews their work before it is sent to the customer. How pedantic any given supervisor is may vary greatly, which can affect an examiner’s quality and output marks. In my experience, very pedantic supervisors may be new managers with little prior supervision experience, which is becoming more common because of the large recruitment of associates from 2014-2016. Pay – while there are pay bands for any given examiner grade, the majority of examiners are at the lowest point in the pay band for their grade. This means that an associate who has worked in the Office for 3.5 years would earn the same salary as an associate who has just joined. Consequently, excluding any Office-wide increases in pay and/or performance-related and/or any other bonuses), associate pay will only significantly increase on promotion to examiner and then, subsequently, to senior examiner. Promotion – very few associates get promoted at 2 years (in the 2014 intake, around 3 out of 50). Many will take 3-4 years and some 4+ years with very little increase in their salary until promotion (see above point). Promotion opportunities beyond senior examiner are very limited. Development opportunities – while such opportunities exist, it may be difficult for people to leave patent examining permanently and still work at the Office in other roles, particularly when examiners are working in technology areas with substantial application backlogs. Solitary – in the absence of any meetings, examiners will mostly be working on their own and so the job, at times, might be viewed as being solitary. Career change – changing careers after working as a patent examiner for several years may be quite difficult (although this will likely vary in different technology areas).