Third Secretary Competition - 2024

There's a line in the application stating:

Please do not use any special characters when filling in the application. Examples of these are as follows: brackets, semi colons, colons, quotation marks, forward slash or backslash)

I was confused by this because surely not all special characters? Full stops and commas should be allowed right even though they are special characters?

So I emailed PAS to confirm and my assumption that it was a non-issue was correct. Imagine your application being thrown out for using a full stop.

Do you know if this means any positions in Limerick would be potentially Africa-focused?

I meant that if you're going to be raging if you get put in Limerick, I wouldn't put it down. It would be a personal preference matter! :)

I've gone for it multiple times over the last decade… it is legendary as being the hardest of all. With the combination of limits on the number of jobs going and the demand from outside the civil service… it's like nothing else. I'd be curious to know exactly how many apply for it in each. Would anyone know the general figures? Haven't seen them.

I seem to recall previous figures of in or around 1200 applications per campaign. With maybe 40 taken onboard at most, that leaves a success rate of only ~3%.

But some people get there.

With regards to putting down Limerick as a location - is anyone familiar with the way the third secretary posts actually work in terms of splitting time between foreign postings and working in Irish offices?

I'd be happy to do a year in Limerick before/after my first posting, but long-term I'd really need to be based in Dublin. Once you return from a posting are you dropped back into the exact role you were doing in Ireland before you left, or is there scope to transfer to the Dublin offices?

Would love some insight on the way the role operates in terms of swapping from postings to Irish-based work from people who have any info!

I am looking at the booklet and correct me if I am wrong but is this competition similar to other roles where everyone is invited to sit the online assessments? If so how different are they to the AO ones as they are the highest assessments I have sat.

DM'd you a copy! 😊

Will DM it to you now. 🙂

Certainly! Actually I'll just post it here for anyone else who needs it lol, sorry I don't know why I didn't do that earlier.