Third Secretary 2026

What's the salary like?

Best of luck to all applying. the pay scale is a bit misleading. yes that will be the starting salary but about 2-3 years in you'd go on a posting abroad for a few years which is a whole different ball game financially.

Not a bad idea, here’s a little bit about my experience.

I applied in August, tested in September/October and did the précis in December, as far as I remember. Then waited until June/July for an interview, had to move country so started in September.

No obs on selection process other than I was helping with the shortlisting for another competition at intern level and was blown away by the calibre of applicants. The average time in HQ is 2 years, this was the same for me but with a temporary posting during this time. Time home between depends on what you want and is usually around 2 years.

Pay scales do not adequately reflect remuneration, as mentioned above. While on posting you will receive allowances which can offset many of the added costs of living abroad. I imagine people could save money from them too.

The job itself is not for everyone, especially on posting. You have a very high level of responsibility and can be dealing with consular emergencies, challenging environments, high level visits at ministerial/ presidential state visit level, very busy development programmes, negotiations etc.

Saying that it Can be very rewarding.

"No obs on selection process" - you're a real DFAT'er now! :>

I read that article and the headline is misleading.

The first line states "Nearly a third of candidates invited to interview or an online assessment for jobs in the public sector did not show up or withdrew from the process"

I'm technically on 3 different panels at the moment, for each I've passed the interview, for another two I will almost certainly be interviewed in the next few months. For the general AO competition, I have an outside shot of getting there. To be blunt, I'd take a 3rd Sec role over all 6 of these positions, meaning I'd be 5/6 of the 30,000 described in the headline.

With the speed of CS hiring, I don't think it's an especially fair way of describing it.

I have often felt its how long the compeititons drag on for that effects the numbers, I understand Publicjobs don't want to be running annual competitions but I feel the attrition rate might be lower if the comps were more frequent but the panels shorter.

Anyone else get an invitation to the Stage 1 on-line assessment? Wondering did everyone get through or was there a shortlisting or something.

Everyone who submits an application gets an invite to stage 1 assessments. It's not indicative of the quality of the application submitted. Ditto stage 2 if you progress that far.

Simiar to kitkat77's post, does anyone have any tips for the Situational Judgement part, or resources you found helped in the past?

Thanks Dory - presuming in these cases - it's appropriate to call her if it's something really important? Second one, as for an extension and explain the situation?

Do we get no emails to say we completed it? I know you’ve to mark it as completed but still never got anything.

Some of those numerical reasoning ones were deadly and that test took me a lot longer than 15 mins.

If you look on Reddit, similar outlook on the numerical reasoning. It seemed way harder than any of the practice tests I could find.

Does anyone know when we'll be hearing about results?

My guess would be by the end of next week, so the 12th, based on going through these hoops a couple of times before.

With 100+ temporary EU policy officers, I think that the required standard at interview will be particularly high.

I wasn't a fan of not being able to go back to previous questions in the assessments, other than that it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before.