Patent examiner

One of the most important tasks of a patent examiner is to review the disclosure in the application and to compare it to the prior art.

Ill-defined "tenure rules", as well as pressure to work overtime to meet the "production quotas", result in very high (over 50% within 4 years after hiring, mostly involuntary) attrition rates among patent examiners, especially at the USPTO.

They are recruited among nationals of the member states and work in one of the EPO offices in Munich, The Hague and Berlin.

At GS-13 they are eligible to start the "Partial Signatory Authority" program, a testing phase to see if an examiner can apply patent concepts (e.g. obviousness and novelty) and laws (35 USC).

After a waiting period a patent examiner may take part in an additional testing phase known as the "Full Signatory Authority" (FSA) program.

When a patent examiner has passed the FSA program, they are given "Full Signatory Authority" and can sign all of their own "office actions" (e.g. allowances, rejections) without review and approval by a supervisor.

Higher paid managers are part of the Senior Executive Service and are technically political appointees.

however, new technologies have been important areas of innovation, so the USPTO employs people with training in biotechnology, business methods, geology, mathematics, and many other disciplines.

Experienced examiners have an option of working primarily from home through a hoteling program implemented in 2006 by the USPTO.

[14] A 2023 study looked into how political preferences of USPTO examiners affect their propensity to allow patent claims.