SRC to finish public job evaluations in March 2016

NAIROBI: Job evaluation for public offices will be completed within 10 months, Salaries and Remuneration Commission Chairperson Sarah Serem has said.

The exercise touches on the civil service, disciplined services, county governments, constitutional commissions, independent offices and teaching services, commercial and strategic state corporations, service and regulatory state corporations and public and tertiary educational institutions.

However, State offices will be excluded.

Speaking in Nairobi yesterday, Ms Serem said the exercise is meant to determine the comparable and relative worth of jobs simultaneously providing for an objective criteria for management of remuneration in the country.

"This evaluation will help ease the collective bargaining agreement process which is a tedious one because concerned parties will now be arguing from an informed position. When it comes to setting the salaries we also have to bear in mind the country's economy," she said.

According to the SRC chair, the total number of employees in the public sector is 680,000 with over a thousand job families. The commission has trained at least 330 officers drawn from the state corporations on the job evaluation process that includes job analysis, evaluation and tools employed.

Serem said: "The public service wage bill stands at Sh528 billion and our intention is to maintain it within the country. Close to 90 per cent of public service jobs are not clearly described and that is what we want to focus on."