Choosing a career in the Civil Service?

[Zaphael]

Hey everyone, I'm kinda new to this forum so pardon me if I resurrected a new carcass of another old thread or something.

I'm currently attempting to pursue a career in the civil service. Primarily looking at the Ministry of Defence, or Home Affairs. Because I'm quite new to the whole "looking for careers and getting employed" thing, I'm quite blur over a few things.

1. How long do I wait for notification after applying? I made some applications to the above ministries a week or two ago. They were via the online application forms of some jobsites like ST701. How long do I wait before its time to realise they are not interested at all in taking me in? Actually there were positions in one of the ministries that I applied in June/July of 2010 and cleared some of the interviews... but was delayed until the end of 2010 before finding out that I was not shortlisted for the positions.

2. I'm a Political Science major from NUS but without Honours. Are the chances really that bad, based on qualifications? I don't really care about the pay being much lower than the honours peepz. Its not that I don't qualify to do my honours year, I just ran out of finances to do it. I'm pretty sure I will be pursuing a Masters in a few years time or so when I save up enough.

I feel like I've been stuck waiting for these ministries for a very long time. And its beginning to get quite depressing.

Forget Mindef or MFA.. it's tough without honours. You could try and intern with international news agencies.

Well, what kind of positions did you apply for in mindef? Some of the positions are highly competitive (think policy) where they only bring in people with scholar calibre (I know dpo is filled with scholars; only 1-2 ppl I know are non scholars there). That may affect ur chances. Pay wise I hear that non honors gets abt 3-400 less.

Having said all of that, it's very hard to do a masters in Singapore without a good honors degree... You might want to take up a study loan and work part time to that end, and that significantly improves your employability prospects. Think about it in terms of lifetimme earnings and the doors it opens for u down the road!

Did u intern anywhere within the civil service, or anything that could give you an edge in getting in?

[Zaphael]

Nope, no such edge. Looks like it looks bleak for me. I'm not really look at policy per say, maybe more of research or implementation. For now finances don't permit another year.

How long do applications usually take to reply people if they are short listed? I did some through some web portals such as st701 but no one got back to me yet.

[laguna]

if ur not a scholar, u can forget about doing policy matters.
if ur not a top nod scholar, u can forget about admin service

even ur a scholar, there are more scholars ahead of u,
scholar also grades as to from which uni