The title game

So a friend of mine works for UBS, and a lunch conversation has came up on the titles UBS employees get. And it works something like this:

For entry level positions, you get the title of "non-officer", yeah, what the heck does that mean right? The best is yet to come: after non-officer, you are promoted to Associate Director, yes, you heard me right, Associate Director. After that, it is Director, then Executive Director, and finally Managing Director.

And you think, it is probably very hard to get out of the 'non-officer' rank, since the next rank is an Associate Director. Actually, not really. 60% of UBS employees have a Associate Director rank or better. For example, if you work for UBS's IT team, you could start as an entry level programmer, hence the rank of a "non-officer", then once you become lead programmer, you are an Associate Director, and so on.

So wouldn't you want to work for UBS (hopefully not at the non-officer rank) and pass out your business cards to friends and families? I mean, telling people you are an Associate Director for one of the world's most prestigious iBank is on par to telling your girlfriend you are a famous actor from a popular Hollywood movie. Well, almost on par.

Man, I wonder how such use of titles came to life? One thing for sure is it does inject some pride into the employees and hence lower HR turnovers for the company.

So if one day I start a company, I will start off everyone as a CEO, then Senior CEO, then Chairman and finally Big Daddy Chairman!