Joyce Lei, a Macao student studying in Taiwan, is going to graduate this summer. Although Lei is interested in playing drama, she still sat in the first Civil Servant Central Recruitment Examination with 10,393 other applicants.

On December 2, 2012, about 10,400 applicants took the civil servant examination, struggling for 128 positions of technical instructor in the Macao government. This means only one in every 81 participants will be successful in landing a job.

“I worked in the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau last summer as a part-timer, the job was quite boring, but I applied this time and will keep on applying for government positions since my parents want me to be a civil servant, because the job is secure; the income is high and I can enjoy various allowances,” Lei said.

Many teenagers, like Lei, are attracted by the benefits of working in government departments, which includes relatively high income with various kinds of allowances and secure employment with stable working hours.

According to the government record, 71.5% of the civil servants are within the group of 200 to 499 Salary Index Point, which is from MOP13,200 to MOP32,934 per month. Aside from a net salary, civil servants enjoy different kinds of benefits including the housing allowance, medical allowance, family allowance, holiday allowance, marriage allowance, birth allowance, seniority bonus and so on. Besides, they enjoy a 22 days paid annual leave and receive 14 months of salary per year.

Another reason is that civil servants have job security. Government departments would need a lot of evidence to prove a civil servant’s incompetence in order to terminate his/her contract. On the other hand, civil servants have a lower chance of having to work over-time compared to other jobs; they normally work for eight hours a day and five days a week. All these lead to the fact that there is a very low rate of turnover and thus there are very few openings in the civil service.

Although it may be hard to get a civil servant post, Newman Lam, Associate Professor of University of Macau gave out some tips about how to achieve good marks in the exam, which included “caring about current events; having a good analytical ability and English skills.”

“I know I won’t get it this time, but I also want to gain some experience, so that I can do better in other civil servant exams,” said Veronica Lao, an applicant who took the Central Recruitment Examination.