N.J.A.C. 4A:4-1.9 Return of employees to their permanent titles

Returning to your permanent title

A permanent employee who takes a provisional appointment and an outside hire who takes the same appointment are in completely different positions, and this is the section that makes the difference. An employee with permanent status in a career service title who is returned during or at the end of a working test period in another title, or from an unclassified, conditional, provisional, interim, temporary or emergency appointment, has rights to a position in the permanent title in the same organisational unit. The outside hire has no title to be returned to.

Two conditions sit on the right. You must have held the permanent title within your current continuous service, so a title held before a break does not qualify. And the return is to the same organisational unit, which means the appointing authority in State service, and a department or separate agency within the same governmental jurisdiction in local service. A school district counts as a separate jurisdiction, which matters in towns where the district and the municipality look like one employer and are not.

The appointing authority is given three mandatory routes to make the return happen: reassign you to a vacant position or title, separate a provisional employee who has no permanent status and reassign you into it, or return an employee serving provisionally in your permanent title to their own permanent title and reassign you. Two of the three displace somebody, which is the mechanism by which provisional appointments unwind. There is also an optional route requiring agreement on both sides, under which you may accept appointment to other titles at the same or lower level, in the same or a different series you qualify for, in the same or another organisational unit, with status and compensation determined by the ordinary rules. Where both are offered you may choose. Where only a mandatory option is offered you must accept it.

When none of that works, the appointing authority has to use layoff procedures. The certification rules recognise the same problem from the other direction: where a certification will displace a provisional employee who has permanent status and layoff procedures have to be started, the Chairperson may extend the disposition deadline by an additional 45 days on written request.

Meanwhile the clock has kept running in your favour. Permanent employees serving provisionally, temporarily or on an interim basis continue to accrue seniority in their permanent titles, and a permanent employee serving a working test period in another title accrues in both. That is the opposite of how the working test period treats the same service: it begins on the date of regular appointment and expressly excludes time served provisionally, temporarily, on an interim basis or under an emergency appointment. Layoff seniority is being earned the whole time. Permanency in the new title is not.

Interim appointments have their own version of the same ending. An interim appointment lasts only while the permanent employee is on approved leave, indefinitely suspended, or awaiting final action on a disciplinary appeal, or until a scheduled closing or phasedown concludes, and at the end of it the interim appointee returns to their permanent title.

What the rule does not give you is a particular desk. The right is to a position in the permanent title within the organisational unit, not to the position you left, and where the appointing authority offers only the mandatory options there is no election to make.

Related on this site: /provisional-appointments, /hiring-process

Written by the NJ Civil Service Navigator editorial team. Every statement here traces to the rules cited on this page. It is not legal advice, and a collective agreement may change how these rules apply to you.