As someone who works in IT, it has been apparent for a long time that the only way to pay experienced technical specialists a salary that is anywhere close to market rates is to promote them to EL classifications. While some agencies/departments are happy to do this to attract and keep specialist staff, with no expectation that they perform management duties, others expect them to directly supervise staff along with performing their technical duties, or won't promote them at all unless they move into a pure management role. Both can even happen without a staff member changing jobs - a change of leadership or MoG changes can mean a specialist EL2 can suddenly find themselves in a workplace where there are "too many EL2s" or where pressure is put on teams to restructure so that all EL2 staff have direct reports.

This is a major disincentive for technical specialists to remain in the public service as they gain expertise. Often they choose to leave the public sector to be paid appropriately without having to perform duties that are not the best use of their skills. Alternatively, they accept management duties, and the quality of the organisation's technical work suffers as these highly skilled specialists find their time consumed with administrative tasks.

The introduction of a separate classification structure for IT specialists would help address these issues. It would allow for specialist staff to be promoted to a level that appropriately recognises their technical skills and value to the public service, without the expectation that they perform management duties. This would also improve mobility of highly skilled staff across the public service, as there would no longer be the situation where a technical EL2 cannot move to agencies that only have management EL2s.

A separate classification structure would still have some issues though - if a top-level specialist wished to change to a different specialty where they lacked experience, the top-level classification would not be justifiable for the new specialty. To retain these staff in the public sector, there would need to be some mechanism to handle this scenario.