10 June 2015, 8 am
The morning starts with Domestic Chores. Now that I have a London pad I have to put out the rubbish in the mornings and clean the floor and things. I confess I didn’t expect the job description for the CIPA President to involve housekeeping activities, but it is a small price to pay for not being in a hotel room with a bed to not-bed ratio of 10:1. At CIPA we hold a teleconference about Occupational Standards. Occupational Standards are lists of things that people have to do in their jobs, and Mr Davies and Ms Sear have been saying for a long time that we ought to have some for the patent profession, so that we don’t feel left out compared to, say, the plumbers and the tax inspectors. So now we have a Working Group whose job it is to get some Standards. I have read up about how you prepare Occupational Standards. It is rather like a claim drafting exercise. You start with the really high level job descriptions, like “Has to be a patent attorney”, and then you get a bit more specific, like “Has to be able to draft patents”, and then you get progressively more specific until you end up with the absolute fundamentals of the job, like “Has to be able to write.” In between claim 1 and claim 10 you have infinite scope for nitpicking and pedantry. You also have to separate skills – which are things you’re able to do – from competencies – which are things where you deploy your skills for a useful purpose. Some of a patent attorney’s skills, for example nitpicking and pedantry, can’t actually be deployed for any useful purpose and so may not be associated with competencies at all. A better example might be that the ability to multiply is a skill, whereas generating an invoice – which usually involves quite a bit of multiplication – is a competency. Mr Davies and Ms Sear are agreed that we need to bring in an expert to do this work for us. And then the expert will talk to patent attorneys to find out what our work involves, and put it into a form that the rest of the world can recognise. This is not a job I would volunteer for if you paid me a million pounds (in which case, strictly, it wouldn’t be volunteering anyway).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
July 2019
Categories |