Can you elaborate what you mean by you are not the competitive type? Because honestly speaking, HR specialist is a highly paid but brutal career track, if you do not want the stress and prefer a more laid back approach to your career, perhaps you should take up administrative generalist roles instead. Competition, hardwork and relentless drive to excel is sort of a given especially in areas like business partnering, recruitment and compensation. HR specialist are a bit like the front office of banks. Companies do not pay big bucks for nothing.

There's no point in hypothesizing about "IF" you can get into HR PSD specialist route as a non-scholar because the short answer is you can't. PSD support functional roles are either scholars or people who have very strong academics who PSD sees having the potential to sponsor their further education in world class overseas universities. They don't state it in their recruitment ads because it is considered elitist and not in good form, but everyone in public sector kind of knows that. The only HR jobs PSD opens to non-academic types are operational ones which have as much value as joining any private company as a HR generalist.

My advice is you need to be honest to yourself and think about what sort of career and work life balance is more suitable for you and make a realistic choice. If you want to compete at levels that pay far beyond average careers, you need to put in 100% effort to survive the jungle. If you cannot / don't want, better not venture there in the first place.