IGEES Graduate Policy Analyst/Economist 2026: how the competition works and how to prepare

The IGEES Graduate Policy Analyst/Economist 2026 competition is open on publicjobs.ie (Vacancy ID 9393) and closes at 3pm on Thursday 22 October 2026. It is the graduate route into economic and policy analysis in the Irish civil service, at Administrative Officer level, and you can apply in your final year, before you have your result.

I spent years in the civil service myself, entering the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as a Third Secretary and leaving as a First Secretary, and I have worked with candidates in IGEES competitions before. This post sets out what the job is, who can apply, how the three stages work, and the feedback I give analysts on their application forms.

Key facts at a glance

Competition	Graduate Policy Analyst/Economist 2026, Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service (IGEES)
Vacancy ID	9393
Grade	Administrative Officer
Closing date	3pm, Thursday 22 October 2026
Salary range	€41,176 to €76,546
Starting annual leave	25 days
Location	Dublin
Contract	Permanent
Online assessment	12 to 17 November 2026 (provisional)
Shortlisting	7 to 11 December 2026 (provisional)
Interview and presentation	First batch in January 2027 (provisional)
Apply at	publicjobs.ie

What is IGEES, and what does a graduate analyst do?

IGEES is the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service, the network of economists and policy analysts who work across the civil service. It was set up in 2012 to build economic and evaluation capacity in Government Departments, so that policy is designed and evaluated on the basis of evidence.

Graduate analysts work in every Government Department in the Dublin region and in a number of public bodies, including the Revenue Commissioners, the Parliamentary Budget Office and the Data Protection Commission. The booklet describes the work as contributing to national policy development, conducting policy analysis and evaluation with quantitative and qualitative methods, appraising and evaluating significant areas of spending under the Public Spending Code, economic modelling and forecasting, briefing and advising senior officials and Ministers, and giving technical advice on regulation. The policy areas range from transport, housing and education to social protection, climate action and fiscal policy.

Three things about how the job is organised are worth knowing before you apply. You do not choose your Department: successful candidates are assigned first to the IGEES Central Unit in the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, which decides where each person goes. You are expected to move between IGEES units in different Departments as your career develops. And you take part in a one-year graduate programme, alongside induction and further training.

Who is eligible, and can you apply before you graduate?

You need one of two qualifications, in a relevant discipline such as economics, social science, policy analysis or statistics:

1. A Level 8 honours degree with a minimum 2.1.
2. A postgraduate qualification at Level 9.

Both are levels on the National Framework of Qualifications, and NARIC Ireland equivalents are accepted for qualifications from abroad.

And yes, you can apply before you graduate. The qualification must be held on or before 31 October 2027, not on the closing date. If you are in your final year, or part of the way through a master's, you say so on the form and apply now. If you succeed at interview you keep your place on the order of merit, and you must present your final result by 31 October 2027 to be considered for a vacancy.

Two things are listed as desirable: experience of data analysis software such as Stata, R, Python, SAS or SPSS, and an awareness of the environment the civil service works in, with a strong commitment to serving the public interest. The booklet says shortlisting criteria may include desirable requirements as well as essential ones, so if you have used any of that software, say where and what for.

The booklet is also firm that an invitation to a test or an interview is not confirmation that you are eligible, and that candidates who come under consideration will be asked for full official transcripts. If your discipline or your result is not an obvious fit, email the competition contact at LargeVolume3@publicjobs.ie before you put the work into a form, and keep the reply.

Three stages between November and January

After the closing date there are three stages, and you must get through each one to reach the next. All of the dates are provisional.

1. Online assessment, 12 to 17 November 2026. You take it online, wherever you have a computer and a reliable connection, within a set time window. Candidates who are invited get a familiarisation booklet with preparation guidelines. If you have not completed every assessment by the deadline, publicjobs treats you as no longer interested and your application goes no further.
2. Shortlisting, 7 to 11 December 2026. A board examines the application forms against criteria based on the requirements of the role. Where a competition attracts a large number of eligible candidates, each form gets a scored assessment, candidates are ranked, and they are invited forward in batches, highest ranked first.
3. Capability-based interview and presentation, with the first batch in January 2027.

Candidates who succeed at the final stage are placed on a panel in order of merit, and vacancies are filled from it. The booklet does not envisage appointments from this competition after January 2028.

The form is submitted in October and read in December

You submit the application form by 22 October. On the provisional timetable, nobody shortlists it until the week of 7 December, after the online assessment. Once submitted it cannot be changed, only one application per person is permitted, and you cannot withdraw and resubmit. So the form you send in October has to be the form you want a board to score more than six weeks later.

If you are worried that you do not have enough experience to write about, read Appendix I of the booklet. It says the framework considers past experience alongside skills, strengths, knowledge, values, motivation and interests, and that the indicators are varied on purpose, so that candidates with different types of experience can show what they are capable of. A dissertation, a group project, an internship, a part-time job, a committee role in a society and voluntary work are all places to look.

The feedback I give analysts on their forms

When I review a form for an IGEES competition, I write the candidate a guidance note: general feedback on the whole form, then each question in turn, with what to keep, what is missing and what can go to make room. Four points from that general feedback apply to a graduate form as much as to a senior one.

1. Give the context first. Before you say what you did, tell the reader what the work was for, why it mattered and how pressing it was. A sentence or two for each example is enough, but it has to be there. The board already has the list of indicators. What it does not have is why your work mattered, what you did and what came of it.
2. Write about one piece of work, not a role. "I was responsible for the data analysis on the project" describes a position. A board marks what you did on one occasion, so pick the occasion: one dataset, one deadline, one finding.
3. Say what you did. It is easy to put yourself on the receiving end of the sentence: "I was asked to support", "I helped to deliver", "my analysis was used to inform". Compare "I helped with the survey analysis for our group report" with "I cleaned the survey data, ran the regressions and wrote the results section of our group report". A board can attribute every part of the second version to you. This matters most for group projects, where an answer written in "we" gives a board nothing it can credit to you. Saying what your own part was is the job of the task in the STAR method, and I have written separately about I-centred language.
4. End on a result or a decision, and take out the self-description. "High-quality", "detailed" and "key" are descriptions, and a reader cannot mark them. A report is not a result in itself. Ask what was decided, approved, published or changed because of your work, and state it as a fact, with a number or a date where you have one. If you handed work over and never heard what became of it, find out. If it was a dissertation, the result is what you found and what you would recommend.

Three smaller points, where the form gives you the opening. In an answer about quantitative skills, put the quantities in: the size of the dataset, the method, the figure you found. In an answer about software, name the packages first and then give a line on what you used each one for. And where an answer has a word limit, everything you add means something else has to come out. The first sentences to cut are the ones that restate the question or repeat the booklet's own wording.

Write the form yourself. The honesty agreement in the booklet says that the use of online systems, software or artificial intelligence to facilitate completion of assessment stages is not permitted, and that candidate responses and submissions are checked for originality and duplication. The voice to aim for is urgent and active: action-led, concrete, plain and proactive.

I do not write or rewrite forms for clients, and nobody should. What I offer is a finding and building your examples session, which works through your degree, your jobs and everything else you have done to find the examples you have forgotten you have, and an application form review, which is a 1-hour session to work through your draft together and the written guidance note described above. If you would rather work alone, my post on how a shortlisting board reads a form and the free application form checklist will take you through it.

Four capability dimensions, written for this role

publicjobs and IGEES designed a custom capability framework for this role, and it is the basis for selection. It has four dimensions: Building Future Readiness, Evidence Informed Delivery, Leading and Empowering, and Communicating and Collaborating. The full framework is linked from Appendix I of the booklet, along with the publicjobs tips for capability-based interviews and a candidate guidance video. Work from that document. My guide to the civil service capability framework explains how the dimensions work and how boards use them, but the indicators to write against are the ones published for this role.

An economist reading that list will go straight to Evidence Informed Delivery, and it is tempting to put all of your best material there. You are being assessed against the other three as well. Look at what the booklet asks candidates to demonstrate beyond research and analysis: communication, oral and written; working as part of a team; producing results to deadlines; showing initiative; and the capacity to develop leadership capability and to lead in your area of expertise. None of that requires you to have managed anyone. It does require examples that are not about analysis at all, or that show another side of the same piece of work: the study group you organised, the supervisor you had to persuade, the deadline you met while working weekends.

The final stage is a presentation and an interview in one session

If you are invited to the final stage, you prepare a short presentation in advance and give it to the board on the day. The board asks you questions about it, and you then go directly into a capability-based interview. Both happen in the one session. The presentation requirements are sent only to candidates who are invited, so you cannot prepare the content yet.

You can prepare the skill. Take a piece of analysis you know well and explain it aloud, in a few minutes, to someone who did not study your subject: what the question was, what you found, and what you would do about it. Record it and listen back. That is close to what a graduate analyst does when briefing a senior official, and it will help with the interview as much as the presentation.

The first batch of interviews is provisionally in January 2027, after shortlisting in the week of 7 December, so the time between a shortlisting result and an interview is likely to include Christmas. If you build your examples properly for the form now, you will be rehearsing in December and not starting again. Structure your answers with the STAR method and practice them aloud; the free interview preparation checklist puts the steps in order. If you want to rehearse with someone who will interrupt and probe as a board does, I offer interview preparation sessions with written feedback afterwards, and you can read what a session involves before you book.

Where to start

Log in or register at publicjobs.ie, open Vacancy ID 9393, and read the candidate information booklet and the capability framework for the role before you write anything. Registering is not applying: the form has to be completed and submitted, and if you do not get an acknowledgement within 24 hours you should email the competition contact. The form saves only when you click "Save and Continue", and 30 minutes of inactivity can log you out, so draft your answers in a document of your own and paste them in. If you already have your final transcript, the booklet encourages you to upload it with the application.

Then give the form the time it needs. It is submitted once, read weeks later by a board that has never met you, and assessed against a framework in which evidence is one dimension of four. A form that shows what you found, what you did with it, who you worked with and what changed gives that board something to credit under each of them. If you would like help with your examples, your form or the interview, email me at sarah@dedico.ie or see my civil service coaching page. If you are new to these competitions altogether, start with how to get a job in the Irish civil service.

Frequently asked questions