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Who handles promotions on a starship?

Agenda

Fleet Captain
Fleet Captain
My theory is that Starfleet Command approves all promotions, but does so under the recommendations of the captain and maybe the first officer and other command staff. Does anyone have any viewpoints on this?
 
I reckon that perhaps department heads may suggest their subordinates for promotions towards the first officer, and they'd consider it, perhaps with the consent of the captain.

For department head level officers, like Chief Engineer or Security officers, it may be up to the captain to suggest their promotion to Starfleet Command, and someone above the captain in the heirarchy may have the final say.

Or it may be a case that an officer may not promote an officer to within a certain amount of ranks below him, i.e a Captain ranked officer can't promote anyone further than the rank of Commander etc.
 
Troi was involved? I can perhaps see it if she's being asked in an advisory roll, i.e advising the deciding officer if the candidate has the psychological capability to handle the extra responsibility, but I would have thought to be in direct control of promotions would be a conflict of interest, since as counsellor, she could end up using information (however subconciously) that shouldn't come into the decision as part of the deciding factors.
 
When Nog gets his promotion at the end of season 7 of DS9 I think he said that Sisko put him in for promotion, which suggests that someone other than Captain Sisko had to approve it.
 
Personally, I think Starfleet has a Board of Personnel which reviews everyone's service records at regular intervals and sees if they are suitable (or even eligible) for a promotion. They probably take into account that person's current assignment and chain of command as well.

In that scenario, a commanding officer may send a request to the Personnel Board to fast-track someone or there may be special circumstances in which a commander (of captain's rank or above) may promote someone directly under their command though...
 
^ That's how I would think it would go as well. Pretty much similar to what happens in RL.

Although, I have to admit -- being a member of a promotion board for Starfleet would probably be pretty amusing. Imagine reading some of the eval reports on people. They probably all read something like:

'Did not flinch in the face of danger while being beat up multiple times in a cave then turned into a shrimp cocktail by Evil Black Swamp Anomaly on Malacore 7. Got better and resolved situation to a positive conclusion.'
:lol:

Cheers,
-CM-
 
Personally, I think Starfleet has a Board of Personnel which reviews everyone's service records at regular intervals and sees if they are suitable (or even eligible) for a promotion. They probably take into account that person's current assignment and chain of command as well.

In that scenario, a commanding officer may send a request to the Personnel Board to fast-track someone or there may be special circumstances in which a commander (of captain's rank or above) may promote someone directly under their command though...

That leaves us with Harry Kim. What did he do or fail to do which stalled a department head at ensign?
 
Personally, I think Starfleet has a Board of Personnel which reviews everyone's service records at regular intervals and sees if they are suitable (or even eligible) for a promotion. They probably take into account that person's current assignment and chain of command as well.

In that scenario, a commanding officer may send a request to the Personnel Board to fast-track someone or there may be special circumstances in which a commander (of captain's rank or above) may promote someone directly under their command though...

That leaves us with Harry Kim. What did he do or fail to do which stalled a department head at ensign?
Got stranded 70,000 light-years in the Delta Quadrant.

But it's also likely that aboard the Voyager, the chief operations officer (or operations manager) only rates an ensign's billet under Janeway's command. He might even have been the only officer in the ship's operations department if that was the case (with the rest of his staff being enlisted personnel)...
 
However having fleet wide promotion boards argues against promotion being dependent upon a billet on a specific ship. Hence the Commander Sulu's and Uhura's serving the same billets they did as Lietenants.
 
Not at all. As I said in my first post, such a board would have to review each person on a case-by-case basis and would have to take into account that person's assignment and how it's chain of command is set up.

Some assignments may allow for fairly rapid promotions while others may not. In some cases, promotion may only come with a change of assignments while senior personnel aboard ships named Enterprise seem to be able to stay there as long as they want...
 
All promotions must be approved by Admiral Catbert of Starfleet Personnel Resources:

946ee13d-5922-4e87-b084-b01d36f263a8.jpg
 
This would be almost impossible to figure out since the writers have been screwing up the rank system and how rank works for decades now :lol:
 
Personally, I think Starfleet has a Board of Personnel which reviews everyone's service records at regular intervals and sees if they are suitable (or even eligible) for a promotion. They probably take into account that person's current assignment and chain of command as well.

In that scenario, a commanding officer may send a request to the Personnel Board to fast-track someone or there may be special circumstances in which a commander (of captain's rank or above) may promote someone directly under their command though...

That leaves us with Harry Kim. What did he do or fail to do which stalled a department head at ensign?

The explanation given was that with Voyager stranded in the Delta Quadrant, there wasn't room for promotion. Which doesn't really hold up. After all, Tom Paris was demoted to Ensign and eventually re-promoted to Lt. If there was room to re-promote Tom, than there should have been room to promote Harry.
 
Troi was involved? I can perhaps see it if she's being asked in an advisory roll, i.e advising the deciding officer if the candidate has the psychological capability to handle the extra responsibility, but I would have thought to be in direct control of promotions would be a conflict of interest, since as counsellor, she could end up using information (however subconciously) that shouldn't come into the decision as part of the deciding factors.
In either case, it's very disturbing that one's mental health professional is also Boss Beardo's fink.

Maybe it's a cultural thing, and the sort of safeguards we assume are necessary have been abandoned by 24th century humans, the Federation gestalt culture overall, or simply Starfleet--a military organization--particularly.
 
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