Scat/Scrat,
If you are talking about the career hold up being due to the intake of other arms for DBA & App Ops, you are wrong. All of theses posts have been created in addition to existing IS Op posts, specifically for Digistisation stage 1. Should this Digitisation work then this will almost certainly promote the profile of the IS Op.
Secondly, there were several R Signals on these courses (mainly the DBA Course) and some of the others from outside the R Sigs had MCSE, Degrees, MCDBA, HNDs in IS to name but a few!
Check your facts - don't listen to rumours!