Civil Service EO/HEO Grade Experience Requirements

To be eligible for the interdepartmental/internal HEO you need to be a civil servant for two years.

At a minimum, you will need to meet the essential requirements. For EO, I believe you need 1 years relevant experience and for HEO, 3 years relevant experience. The definition of experience is defined in the booklet. If you’re in doubt, throw in an application and the worst thing that’ll happen is a PFO.

Typically, a HEO is a promotional grade and you need to be an existing civil servant to apply. This doesn’t apply for specialist posts however.

ICT Specialist HEO posts are normally recruited via an open competition for anyone to apply.

No, the latest ICT EO was unusual and required 1 years ICT experience. There have been a few EO panels so perhaps you looked at another panel?

The questions you are asking HEO vs AO relates to how general civil service grades have come about over time. It is long established that an AO and a HEO are equivalent grades (even if many civil servants might think otherwise). This is because the end of both pay scales end up with the same salary. That doesn’t mean they do the same job, even though in many cases AOs are doing what was once seen as HEO work. A generalist AO is seen as the fast track to AP, and they don’t normally stay more than 5 years.

I can’t comment on ICT AOs, I think Revenue are the only Dept that recruit them. They also recruit AOs for other disciplines.

Typically an AO should be part of an AO programme (sort of like an induction) and is more policy based, designed for graduates, expected to network and get to know other fellow AOs in other Departments.

ICT HEO roles are more established, and can be very varied. They could be responsible for carrying out system administration duties, managing a data centre, developing a new web application, project management or sadly in some areas, doing non ICT tasks. It is not uncommon to find ICT HEOs with no staff, yet for generalist HEOs this is unusual. The sad reflection of Civil Service ICT is that pay is just not competitive enough, so many graduates don’t apply and now there is going to be huge difficulty in filling EO panels as it cannot pay as well as the private sector, so many graduates don’t bother applying.

Yep, seems completely pointless and a waste of their time (& taxpayers money) but the information booklets are clear on the process and say that requirements will only be checked at job offer stage so the onus in on the applicant to make sure they meet the eligibility criteria before they apply.

Although I can't help but wonder is it an additional test to see who actually reads everything!

But plenty of people know they're not remotely qualified for a role and "throw their hat in anyway" - you just have to read through the threads here to see that - and others have their eye on another role so they're applying for the practice, so you'd think PAS would check that eligibility is met at the start.

I reckon the only way to stop this would be to say eligibility will be checked first thing and those that don't meet the essential requirements will be banned from future competitions for say 5 or 10 years!

An internal competition in one department recently did state that they would check the 2 years service requirement (general grade, nothing else required other than 2 years service in the dept) at the start and emphasied that in the circular, email, reminder email, email to managers, etc and still people ignored it and got pissed off when they were told they were out.

Even then, I’ve known people to pass interview, panelled and then be disqualified based on essential criteria not being met!