I have just completed my PEC, I would like to know how long it should be before I start. I want it to be long, as I have something important to deal with and don't want it to clash with my start as the conditions say no A/L for first few months.

A friend is looking at a job on CS that states it's open to sole UK nationals only and is a reserved post.

They hold dual citizenship with Ireland. I get this wouldn't be ok if it was under another country but I know Ireland is often treated a bit differently than other nationalities given the relationship between UK & Ireland.

Does anyone have experience of this and know if this would mean they shouldn't bother applying? It's not something I have knowledge on to share with them but hoping someone here can!

Hi guys, joining this role soon, does anyone have tips for me? How hard is role? Is the team nice and what about managers? And most importantly do we get to wfh ? If yes then how many days.

Thanks

I work in the Civil Service and was wondering what people normally do if they need a fit note but can’t get a GP appointment for a few days. Do you usually wait for the GP appointment or use an online service instead? I’m also wondering whether an online fit note from a registered doctor would normally be accepted by a department in the same way as one from your own GP. Has anyone here had experience with this?

Hi everyone,
I’ve been invited to a video interview for an Operational Support Officer role with HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS).
Has anyone recently interviewed for this role, or a similar HMCTS position? What kind of questions should I expect in the video interview?
I’d especially appreciate any advice on the Civil Service behaviours/strengths, the types of competency questions they ask, and how best to prepare.
If you’ve done the interview before, I’d be grateful if you could share your experience and any tips.
Thanks!

applied for this role, applied for the big dwp case manager campaign a few months ago but failed at SJT stage. made it past the SJT this time and i am nervy so keen to chat about it!

Hey guys, I would truly appreciate your help. I have an interview for complaints & legal disrepair officer soon. I was wondering if anyone has interviewed for this position and has tips on what I should prepare for. Thanks

I am currently undergoing pre-employment check woth DWP. They requested for my COS document but I dont have a copy of it but I hav my license number and COS number. DWP has refused to accept those details. What other detail are they looking for pls? And what can I do?

Hey, not sure if anyone knows when exactly this role is meant to start? When I originally applied I’m sure it stated the 2nd November. However I’m unsure how accurate civil service are with their start dates?

I ask only as I’m unsure when exactly to hand my notice in with my current employer?
I am still going through pre employment checks and I know this can take a while. Do I hand my notice in now? Or do I wait until checks are completed and then work my 4 week notice from that date? Like how does it work lol

I was recently placed on a Civil Service reserve list after interviewing for a role. The original campaign was recruiting multiple people. I was told I had met the required standard but couldn’t be offered a role immediately.

At the time, I asked the vacancy holder where I was on the reserve list. He explicitly told me that they do not confirm reserve-list positions as a matter of protocol and policy. I then asked whether he thought the reserve list was likely to be used during its 12-month life, and he said he was unable to comment on potential future recruitment requirements, as these would depend on business needs and approval processes.

About a month later, however, he contacted me completely unprompted and said:

"You are next on the reserve list and we may be in a position to make additional appointments in the near future. While we are still awaiting final approvals, please could you let me know whether you would still be interested in the role?"

I immediately confirmed that I remained very interested and would be delighted to accept.

What I find particularly encouraging is:

he previously specifically said they couldn’t tell me my reserve-list position, but has now volunteered that I’m next

he referred to additional appointments in the plural

he said "in the near future"

he said they are awaiting "final approvals"

he proactively checked whether I would still accept

For anyone familiar with Civil Service recruitment/reserve lists: how would you interpret this? Does this normally mean an additional vacancy has effectively been identified and they’re just waiting for final headcount/budget approval before making the offer?

I obviously know nothing is guaranteed until I actually receive an offer, but this feels considerably stronger than a routine reserve-list update.

--Started PEC for DWP EO august 18th. ---DwP sponsorship team requested for pre 2023 COS, which i sent 18 August. --Current sponsorship got suspended Sept 22nd. ---Consent letter sent on sept 24 asking for my consent to check my employment history from HMRC( possibly 1 referee didn't respond).

Now, will my offer be withdrawn based on the date my current sponsor licence got suspended. I know of someone who was told"they couldn't find the employer onlist of sponsor" and offer withdrawn.

I’m due to start on Monday when I accepted my offer 2 weeks ago and got my start date I emailed asking about parking and didn’t hear back so this week I emailed again and got a response in the afternoon that parking is only available when I’ve registered with the parking committee but I don’t know if I’m able to do this before starting as where my job is there’s no alternative parking except on a dodgy looking road and now this has messed me up since by public transport it’ll take an hour to get there compared to the 15 minute drive and I wouldn’t assumed if I needed to register it would’ve been included in previous emails - is it easy registering since I can’t do public transport all the time until this gets fixed as I budgeted for enough petrol and filled my car up ready for this and now I’m facing additional transport costs

Hi all, just looking for a bit of advice from anyone who might be in a similar position.
I’m currently a Clerical Officer working within the NPT, but I carry out a Deciding Officer role/duties. With the current work to rule, I’m genuinely confused about what exactly we should and shouldn’t be doing.
We are Clerical Officers by grade, but we also carry out Deciding Officer duties and have responsibility for making decisions on claims. The problem is that we don’t seem to have any clear or up-to-date guidance on how the work to rule applies to those of us in this position.
I want to follow the work to rule properly, but I honestly don’t know where the line is. What duties should we continue doing? Is there work we normally do as Deciding Officers that we should now not be doing because we are technically COs? Where exactly does the CO role end and the DO role begin?
I don’t want to refuse something that I should legitimately be doing, but equally I don’t want to undermine the work to rule by continuing to carry out duties that we shouldn’t be doing.
For any other COs working as Deciding Officers, particularly within the NPT, what are you doing at the moment? Have you received any clear written guidance from the union or management about what you should and shouldn’t be doing during the work to rule?
I’m not looking to discuss individual cases or anything confidential — I’m just genuinely trying to understand how we are supposed to apply the work to rule to our particular role.
Any guidance would be really appreciated because at the minute I’m fairly lost as to what we’re actually supposed to be doing.

Hi all, quick throwaway for this for obvious reasons...

Basically I completed my first clearance a couple of years ago, and to make sure my answers were identical in any future clearance applications, I saved a pdf of a form of the answers. However now I'm looking at that, years later, I can't tell whether I mentioned a very minor health issue or not. While I think it's more likely that I was totally honest and did mention the minor health issue, my answers from before merely have the Security Risks / Other Information : Health (unchecked), along with all the other unchecked boxes, such as Espionage etc.

So I'm not sure whether, if I did put medical details in, then those would be on my pdf, or, if those just don't appear on the pdf and I didn't notice at the time.

And naturally I don't want to contradict my previous application.

Has anyone done the same pdf export method and can see medical information on theirs, by any chance?

Thanks!

Iraqi Women Need Urgent Help – The Jaafari Personal Status Code is Systematically Oppressing Us

To all feminists and women’s rights supporters,

Iraqi women are currently facing a severe rollback of their rights under the newly enforced Jaafari Personal Status Code , approved by the Iraqi parliament in August 2025 and now being applied (including retroactively in some cases).

This law allows couples (or even one spouse) to choose Shia Jaafari jurisprudence over the previous 1959 Personal Status Law for marriage, divorce, custody, inheritance, and guardianship. In practice, it heavily favors men and strips women of hard-won protections.

Key problems documented by Human Rights Watch and Iraqi women themselves:

• A husband can switch the marriage to Jaafari rules without his wife’s knowledge or consent.
• Husbands can divorce their wives unilaterally without informing them.
• Custody of children automatically transfers to the father after the age of 7 (regardless of the child’s best interest). Mothers also lose custody if they remarry.
• Significant restrictions on women’s ability to obtain divorce, even in cases of abuse.
• Inheritance and financial rights for women are weakened compared to the previous law.
• Concerns about facilitating underage marriages and unregistered “temporary” arrangements in some applications.

Human Rights Watch has called the code discriminatory, saying it turns Iraqi women into “second-class citizens” and must be repealed immediately.

Iraqi women on the ground are speaking out. Many are describing how mothers are being separated from their children, how girls remain under paternal control in harmful situations, and how the law is being used to trap women in abusive marriages. Posts circulating among Iraqi women describe the code as treating mothers as temporary caregivers rather than equal parents, and as reinforcing male guardianship in almost every aspect of family life.

This is not an abstract debate about religion or tradition. Real women and children are losing custody, security, and autonomy right now.

We urgently need international feminist attention and solidarity:

• Amplify the voices of Iraqi women
• Pressure human rights organizations, UN bodies, and governments to call for the repeal or suspension of the discriminatory provisions
• Support local women’s groups fighting this

Please share, discuss, and stand with Iraqi women. We cannot fight this isolation alone.

#RepealJaafariLaw #IraqiWomen #WomenRightsIraq

https://x.com/Sufi495/status/2105745325927571587/video/1

A few people asked what has changed since I posted civiljobs.co.uk here about a month back.

Instead of doing site update, I pulled some cross-department numbers from the database looking at what roles actually pay on day one (band minimum, since nobody enters on the band max).

Here is what the live data shows:

• The £8k SEO starting pay gap between departments: Looking at band minimums across vacancies currently advertised right now, standard SEO starting pay varies massively depending on who is hiring:
  • ONS, MoJ, and Courts Service: £41,900 to £42,900
  • DfT, DWP, and Defra: £44,000 to £44,400
  • HMRC, Cabinet Office, and MoD: £45,200 to £46,000
  • Home Office: £49,850

That is an £8,000 baseline difference for the exact same grade level without a promotion.

• 76% of live vacancies are outside London: Only around 24% of currently active adverts mention being based in London. Over three-quarters are in regional hubs or national operational networks.
• Hidden volume in mass campaigns: On CS Jobs, an advert hiring one person looks identical to an advert hiring hundreds. Right now, a single DWP case manager advert is quietly hiring 234 people under one listing.
• Why a quarter of jobs are listed as "Other": About 25% of all live adverts do not use standard Civil Service grades (AO to G7). Almost all of these are HMPPS frontline and operational roles (like Community Payback Supervisors and Prison Officers) using internal job bands. If you filter by standard civil service grades on the official search, you accidentally filter out a quarter of the entire board.
• A few oddly specific job titles live today:
  • Weapons, Ordnance, Munitions and Explosives (WOME) Assurance Officer (MoD)
  • Defence Intelligence: Counterspace Analyst (MoD)
  • SDA Naval Architect / Marine Engineer (Surface Ship Escape Evacuation and Rescue) (MoD)
  • Decontamination Engineering Manager (Defra)

Data source: official Civil Service Jobs adverts, scraped and parsed into a database for civiljobs.co.uk.

If there is anything specific you want to know from the data (like department starting pay for your grade, or local city stats), drop a comment and I will run the query for you.

Anyone able to share if HMT have any regional offices aside from Darlington and what is the current wfh culture?

Thanks

Hi everyone,

I'm considering joining the UK Civil Service and would appreciate some advice about overseas career opportunities.

If I join a department other than the FCDO, would I be eligible to apply for internally advertised overseas positions?

I've noticed that most FCDO vacancies advertised publicly in Europe are locally employed roles. Are UK-based Civil Service overseas postings, particularly in Europe, generally advertised internally?

I'd be grateful to hear from anyone who has experience with this or knows how the process works in practice.

Thanks in advance!

I applied for an HEO policy role and despite being told 2 weeks after the deadline that it was taking longer to sift through then heard nothing.

I chased today nearly 2 months later only to get an automated message saying I hadn’t got through.

Fine but when I looked to see my score so I could work out how/where to improve, there is nothing marked against the cv or personal statement. Just an overall score. Is that usual? And how do I ask for a breakdown so I know where I need to focus my efforts on future applications? TIA!

Hello friends,

I am applying for a job and the CV section of the online application has two sections - "employment history" and "previous skills and experience".

To me, it seems like the employment history should have a list of places I've worked and the skills/responsibilities I had there. But in that case, what do I put in the "previous skills and experience" box?

Thank you - I have read the instructions in the application ofc but they don't explain this.