Yes Mark.N this is exactly what is happening. I wouldn't care if all the trainees in our place were being paid the same.

Jordan, what are your options once your training has finished?

Perhaps that's the problem within the the NHS .. pulling the ladder up behind you....

Cheers
Mark

Surely that only happened in the navy, Mark?

Under A4C all jobs are scored and then banded, depending on the score. This should in fact put identical jobs on the same band. Don't forget, its not the person who gets banded but the value of the job. However the people that score the jobs are not always the same, so you can get identical jobs with different bands, it happened here, but a few appropriate words (not repeatable) put them on the same band.
If Jordon feels he is doning the same or more than somebody on a higher band, he needs to see how both jobs were scored.

Don't want to digress too much but.....regarding Geoff comments about the Apprentice route and 'doubting that such an approach would sit well within the organisation of the NHS'. Well that is not our experience of the situation.

In my time here we have had two EBME apprentices taken on and were both successful in their training. The both did an HNC in tandem with their work based training - seemed to work for us. Only thing I didn't take a fancy to was the amount of paperwork they had to do for their NVQ.

Check things out with the local college, ours were very good. As far as I understand it, under A4C they could still go that route (i.e. an apprenticeship) under payband4 whilst in training.

Perhaps I didn't express myself very well. What I was really driving at was having the fledging tech mentored by the more experienced one (a situation that can absorb a fair amount of the senior tech's time).

Firstly, to answer your question, my understanding is that the trainee band should be 4 (in those ebme depts which still employ trainees), automatically rising to 5 on qualification. If this is truly a training post then the newly qualified tech should not have to wait for a band 5 to become available and then apply for it; his eventual promotion should be budgeted for when he is taken on.

But secondly, with a Physics degree (A-level route, Russell group university?) a trainee clinical scientist post would be more suitable than technician's work, I would have thought. The following link may be of help. Sorry if you've already been through all this, by the way.

http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/details/Default.aspx?Id=235

Panander, I notice that your response on this thread contains a lot of 'should' does that mean that there is no definitive answer, especially as you are also advising another route for a career within the NHS.

Can we assume that the bloke in question is young enough to be in a position to make up his mind what he actually wants to be?

Here are some clues:-

1) An engineering technician working on medical equipment in hospitals.

2) A physicist ... "scientist", or some other such thing?

More clues:-

1) Engineering technicians do "hands-on" practical work which involves an understanding of engineering principles. It also involves being able to walk before you can run. That is, experience that can only be acquired over a period of time of actually doing the work!

2) Some things cannot best be learned in books, from seminars, classrooms etc. but instead involve getting stuck in and having a go! In fact (come to think of it), years ago we used to have Trade Tests whereby each new level of attainment was tested in a practical way. In other words, it was only once you had actually proved yourself that you could hope that benefits (such as increments in pay, or even promotion) might follow.