EPO reviews

I think this work is good for people with a legal bend. It requires a lot of search in internal databases as well as external and www and communicating with applicants, mostly in written form. It is solitary work and there is little sense of belonging to a team. If you want more creative job and are not into legal side of things, this is probably wrong place for you.

The job is very repetitive and many senior colleagues are not motivated anymore. The management is awful (as featured in many major European newspapers). Being an international organization, they are not subject to national labour laws and they are currently implementing strange reforms at a very fast pace and without carrying out any kind of impartial assessment. The recruitment process in random : many patent examiners were interviewed for one field, and then they were assigned to a completely different field after the initial training. The probation period is very long (one year) and the result of the probation is somehow a lottery, depending on many out-of-control factors.