Clerical officer in the civil service 2026 campaign

I seebon one of the pdfs that was attached it said click here to see how many positions arose for each county. The link didnt work for me for CO but was able to access on details for EO

Same. It's a bit of a tease. A few wks ago I was able to see there was 9 EOs from the last panel in tipp

In the 180s for Mayo! I won’t hold my breath for an interview. Was my first time applying though so pleased I managed it. Good luck everybody whatever happens.

130s in Mayo. Not holding out much hope unless a bus load of COs go off a cliff!

I have very little life let alone work experience but placed in the second top band for situation judgment and top band for the mini written exercises.

I think the best thing that I done was make sure that the SJ answers aligned with the CO capability framework in terms of the ”good” and “bad” answers. I went through each statement and assessed if it went against or was supportive of the framework.

There are few that were a little between two answers... I went with being a grass and reporting concerns of other colleague’s lack of work to manager if asked about their work (the CO framework for communication said something along the lines of highlight concerns of staff work so I assume this was a “good” response?)

Then apart from that there was some good bits of advice on approaching scenario's on the past couple of years of CO Dublin 2023 and Nationwide boards threads (2019-2024) within the first 10 pages or so.

Again, I imagine the ones I was stuck on and between two potential answers dragged me down to the 500’s in SJ.

I probably should have researched the situation judgement ones a bit more both times. I know exactly how I would deal for real with these scenarios, but I have no idea if my approach is what they want to hear or if they are expecting something completely different.

Just out of interest, did you usually opt for just one 'good' answer or where there were times when it was okay to go for two? Ditto with the 'bad' ones? I definitely need to brush up hard on this before entering any future competitions. I suspect I'm making very simple and basic errors.

That's what I guessed myself and I wasn't at all afraid to put two same answers for some of the scenarios. But I'm clearly opting for the 'wrong' ones in many instances (as per the ranking) i.e. going for weak instead of bad, adequate instead of weak etc and it's costing me. Should I have been edging more towards being negative and labelling a lot of scenarios as either 'weak' or 'bad' or being positive and opting for 'good' or 'adequate' more times?

Well done yourself by the way in getting such a high score.

Thanks, I don’t really remember much of doing the application as I was focusing on preparing for the EO assessments haha. I did it at 1am on my phone.

I think you’re over thinking it to be honest. Bad is like “this is something that would go against you in work”, weak more like “not really a great thing to do but you won’t get in trouble”, adequate “yea that’s a solution but not the best solution” and then good is just the best thing to do in the situation.

That’s how I read it anyway. It was very similar in the EO ones but you had excellent as well. It’s a silly way of testing people I think, for the same reason why I think a 1-10 pain scale is silly because it’s subjective. They want you to answer a very certain way and to me that was “stay in your lane, talk to your manager, help colleagues but not to the detriment of your own work etc”. That’s just from my own experience of already being a CO (I’m hoping to get a new role instead of waiting for mobility)

but then i seen this in the information booklet!

It is not envisaged that appointments will be made from this competition after 30th April 2027

It’s taken me years to get good at these and that includes my time as a TCO too! My score went from 471 to 638 with just purely my experience to base off how would I approach the situation.
I had a few “good” answers but a lot of mine were “adequate” or “weak” I only realised this year you could select the same answers for each scenario.
This competition is so competitive this year’s comp seems even more so! Some of the OOMs for Dublin are mental.
I’ve been applying since 2022 so it’s taken 4 years to crack the top 10 on an open panel!

For sure! I think most of my answers were adequate and weak as well. I’m only in the CS two years this month but I entered through a panel specific for my office so didn’t need to do tests like these. My office leans very heavily on team work and reporting/querying with your manager so it definitely helped. If I wasn’t already in that environment I don’t think I would have done as well at all.

I don’t think the tests are very clear at all, I only knew you could select the same answer multiple times because my other half had done the EO ones for the last panel and they’re much the same.

I believe they’ll ask questions relating to the capability framework. I can’t link it but if you google clerical officer capability framework you’ll find it on public jobs.

Your best bet is to come up with examples of when you’ve used skills relating to the capabilities.

Just out of interest, were there any answers where you didn't reply 'good' and just went for 'adequate' instead? I'm trying to get a handle on whether they always expect at least one 'good' answer. I suspect too I might have overused the 'bad' ones.

Thank you.

ChatGPT and AI…..I never thought of that one 😀

There were several people on past boards threads saying that multiple answers could be the same. Before, I assumed we had to rank them and thank God people here told me otherwise before I submitted.

For some, I had 3 bad or 2 weak or 2 bad. Again, I didn’t score top, but it was stressed that you aren’t expected to use up all the four words in each answer. One of them I had used all four but the rest had multiple of the same. It’s hard to see looking back how some of these could be any different ranking, I’d love to know where I fell down.