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Civil Service Administrative Officer (AO) jobs

There are currently 171 AO vacancies open across the Civil Service.

Administrative Officer is the grade most people mean when they talk about a Civil Service job. AO is where the state meets the public: benefit claims, tax enquiries, visa applications, court listings, driving licences. If a member of the public deals with a government department, there is usually an AO on the other side of it.

The distinguishing feature of AO work against AA is judgement within a framework. You are still applying rules rather than writing them, but the cases are less clear-cut, you are trusted to decide more of them without escalating, and you will often be the person explaining a decision to someone unhappy about it. Several departments also use AO as their standard customer-contact grade, which means telephony or face-to-face work as a defined part of the role rather than an occasional extra.

AO vacancies are the highest-volume campaigns on the board by a wide margin, and they are the reason the open-posts count on this tracker is worth checking. A department filling ninety AO posts in one campaign and a department filling one are advertising in exactly the same format, and the official results list does not distinguish them. Your odds are not remotely comparable.

On assessment, AO sits at the same behaviour level as AA but panels expect more independence in the examples. The strongest AO answers describe a situation where the answer was not obvious, say what you weighed up, and say what you decided — a story where you simply followed instructions correctly reads as an AA answer given at AO level.

Live vacancies

Search and filter all 171 vacancies

The full board also shows how many posts each campaign is filling, which the official results list does not.

Common questions

What is the difference between AA and AO in the Civil Service?
AA work is largely defined and supervised; AO work involves applying judgement within a framework, deciding more cases without escalating, and often dealing directly with the public. AO also pays more and is the more common entry grade.
How many people do Civil Service AO campaigns usually hire?
It varies enormously — some AO campaigns fill a single post and others fill dozens across several sites. The official job board does not show this on its results list, which is why this tracker surfaces the number of posts per campaign.
Do AO jobs involve working with the public?
Often, yes. AO is the standard customer-contact grade in the large operational departments, so telephony, correspondence or face-to-face service is a defined part of many roles. The job summary on each advert says so explicitly.
Is AO a good entry point into the Civil Service?
It is the most common one. AO gives you a substantive grade, access to internal-only campaigns at EO and above, and experience of how a department actually works — which is difficult to evidence convincingly in an application from outside.

Read the full guide — what the grade involves, how it is assessed, and worked answers.

Vacancy data is sourced from Civil Service Jobs. This tracker is not affiliated with the Civil Service or the Cabinet Office.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.