We have tried different ideas in the past with departments, including qualifications for officers. For example, the corps were an idea – engineering corp, comms corps etc. Each one aimed to train officers and test officers so that they could advance in expertise. You could then earn “badges” like “Veteran Engineer” to recognise your expertise. Sadly they never took off. We could try them again, and combine them in to smaller corps based on the organisation of the roles e.g. Operations Corps, Engineering Corp etc.
I think the key thing was recognising officers for their commitment to the division and seniority and evening out the leap from Lieutenant to Lieutenant-Commander. It was mentioned that the advancement to Lieutenant is pretty steady, whereas the jump to Lieutenant Commander was quite a leap.