It doesn’t prevent me getting a promotion, there’s no open positions is all, so I sometimes take people’s positions while they’re on leave in the meantime (so I know they want to promote me ASAP and it gives me a better pay for a few weeks at a time).

As for negotiating a salary, it’s just part of the terms and conditions where I work, starting employees at a higher salary needs to be justified and after employment there’s no provision in place for accelerated pay step increases or anything of the sort and there’s rules in place regarding salary calculation when getting promoted.

The real issue (and our managers agree with that) is that we’re missing a position between where I’m at now and the next position which is a support role for my position. They need to add an “advanced” version of my position either with the same pay rates as the people in support positions or move them one rank up as well.

But the higher ups would never be able to justify it financially and they already have a hard to determining who’s ready to move from the “trainee” position to the “regular” position 🤷