These guides explain how to prepare an application. The original vacancy and its recruitment authority decide eligibility, required documents, selection stages and deadlines. Role suggestions use published job titles and simple matching rules; choose another guide when a title is ambiguous.
Your application, step by step
Translate the specification into evidence
List the required technologies, delivery responsibilities and service constraints. For each, record a project and your contribution. Distinguish essential qualifications from certifications or tools listed as an advantage.
Build two compact project stories
Describe the problem, users, architecture or analytical method, your decisions and the outcome. Include accessibility, reliability, data quality or security where relevant. Link public code or a demo only when it is permitted and useful.
Answer the public-service questions
Show how you handled competing stakeholder needs, a service incident, documentation or a difficult technical trade-off. Explain your own work in plain language; the selection panel may include colleagues outside your specialism.
Follow the announced assessment format
If there is a coding, data, architecture or security exercise, check its tools, time limit, accessibility arrangements and rules on external assistance. Submit the employer’s application form and any requested portfolio separately.
Prepare for selection
- Practise a short explanation of a system you built, including a failure mode and the trade-offs you made.
- For data roles, explain how you checked the input data and tested whether a conclusion was reliable.
- For security roles, prepare an authorised incident or risk-management example; describe response and communication without exposing sensitive systems.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Listing technologies without evidence of using them.
- Assuming every public IT job requires citizenship or an existing security clearance; read the conditions of that vacancy.
Official guidance
Check the current instructions from the recruiting organisation before submitting.