When I was trying to get into the civil service, I did not put everything on one competition. I applied across more than one stream and sat more than one interview. People associate me with Third Secretary, but that was not the only thing I went for at the time.
I mention this not to list what I applied for, but because the experience taught me something that holds at every grade: these are competitive competitions, and they reward the people who take them seriously. If you are preparing an application now, whether it is your first civil service competition or your fifth, here is what I would want you to know before you start.
Every competition is competitive
It is easy to assume that some grades are a formality, or that a particular stream will have a weaker field. That assumption is wrong, and it costs people places they could have had. Open, interdepartmental and internal competitions all attract large numbers of capable applicants, and senior-grade competitions such as Assistant Principal Officer in 2026 are no exception. The bar moves up with them. A competition you might have walked into a decade ago is not the same competition today.
So treat every stage as something you have to earn. The application form is not a registration exercise. At shortlisting, the written content itself is assessed, not just whether you have the underlying experience. Write a thin or careless form and you can be screened out before anyone ever meets you, no matter how good you are at the actual job.
Write for the person reading your form
The person shortlisting your application has not sat in your chair. They do not know your organisation's internal politics, the system that kept falling over, the colleague who left in the middle of a project, or why a task that looks routine on paper was actually difficult. They know only what you tell them, in the words you put on the form.
That means the burden is on you to make the difficulty visible. If you overcame something hard, say what made it hard and what you did about it. Do not assume the reader will infer the challenge from your job title or the context. They will not, and they are not supposed to. They score what is in front of them.
Write so that someone with no knowledge of your specific role can follow what you did, why it mattered, and what the result was. Concrete detail beats vague summary. A named situation, a clear account of your own actions, and an outcome the reader can picture.
An old form is not a shortcut
If you have applied for a competency-based or capability-based role before, you may be tempted to lift your old answers and submit them again. Don't. Be serious about this.
A form you wrote two or three years ago was written for a different competition, possibly at a different grade, against a different framework, by a slightly different version of you. The examples may be stale. The framework may have changed. The standard expected at the grade you are now aiming for is almost certainly higher. Reusing old material wholesale is one of the clearest signals to a board that someone has not put the work in.
Your old form is fine as raw material. Mine it for examples you had forgotten about. But the answers themselves need to be written again for the competition in front of you, against the current framework, at the level you are going for.
Start with the capability framework
Before you write a word of your form, read the capability framework for the grade you are applying to. Not the grade you are in. The grade you want.
The Civil Service Capability Framework sets out what is being assessed, and the emphasis shifts as you move up the grades. What earns a strong score at one level is taken as given at the next. The framework is published, it is free, and it is the actual basis on which you are marked at both shortlisting and interview. Reading it properly is the most useful hour you can spend before you start drafting.
When you read it, do not just scan the names of the dimensions. Look at the behavioural indicators underneath each one. Those indicators are, in effect, the marking criteria. Your task is to show, through real examples from your own work, that you operate at that level.
Keep an example bank
This is something I recommend to everyone I work with. Build an example bank before you start writing, and keep adding to it.
An example bank is a running record of strong, concrete examples from your own experience: times you led something, solved a problem, handled a difficult stakeholder, delivered under pressure, improved a process, or made a hard call. For each one, note what the situation was, what you specifically did, and what came of it. Then map them against the dimensions of the capability framework for your grade.
Two useful things happen when you do this. First, you stop scrambling to remember good examples the night before a deadline, and you stop leaning on the same tired story for every question. Second, you start to see where you are thin. If a whole dimension has no solid example behind it, that is worth knowing early, while you still have time to do something about it or to think harder about what you actually have.
The bank is as useful at interview as it is on the form. The board will draw on your application when they put their questions together, so the examples you prepared and the ones they ask about will overlap. Walking in with a well-stocked bank, rather than a handful of half-remembered stories, is the difference between sounding prepared and sounding caught out.
For a fuller guide to building one, read Build an Example Bank for Competency Interviews.
Don't waste the chance
A career in the civil service has real range to it. You can move across departments, work on things that matter, and build a long career with genuine variety in it. That potential is exactly why the competitions are worth doing properly.
Cutting corners on the application is a strange way to treat an opportunity that could shape the next decade of your working life. The people who do well are not necessarily the most naturally gifted. They are the ones who read the framework, wrote for the person actually reading the form, built their examples deliberately, and took a competitive process seriously because it is one. Do that and you give yourself a real chance, which is all any of this is really about.
If you want help with an application or interview, you can email me at sarah@dedico.ie.
Frequently asked questions
Are civil service competitions in Ireland competitive at every grade?
Yes. Open, interdepartmental and internal competitions all attract large numbers of capable applicants, and the standard rises with the field. At shortlisting the written content of the application form is assessed, not just whether you hold the underlying experience, so a thin or careless form can be screened out before interview.
Can I reuse an old competency-based application form for a new civil service competition?
Use an old form only as raw material to remind yourself of examples. Do not submit old answers as they are. They were written for a different competition, possibly a different grade, against a different framework, and the standard expected at the grade you are now aiming for is almost certainly higher. Write the answers again for the competition in front of you.
What is an example bank for a civil service application?
An example bank is a running record of strong, concrete examples from your own work: leading something, solving a problem, handling a difficult stakeholder, delivering under pressure, improving a process, or making a hard call. For each, note the situation, your specific actions and the outcome, then map them against the dimensions of the capability framework for your grade. It saves you from scrambling at deadline, stops you reusing the same story, and shows you where your evidence is thin.