What the Concorso Unico RIPAM Assistenti is
The Concorso Unico RIPAM is a single national competition that recruits for many Italian public administrations at once. Instead of each ministry, agency and public body running its own selection, the Commissione RIPAM under the Dipartimento della Funzione Pubblica publishes one notice covering all of them, with Formez PA handling the operational side. The Assistenti edition covers the Area degli Assistenti, the grade that a candidate holding only an upper secondary school diploma can enter.
The 2026 edition offered 3,997 permanent full time posts across ministries, social security bodies and central agencies, split across four professional profiles: 2,913 administrative assistants, 498 economic assistants, 583 IT assistants and 3 technical assistants. Applications closed at 18:00 on 27 January 2026 and, according to reporting by Concorsando, drew 296,370 applications.
Who can apply
The general requirement is the diploma di istruzione secondaria di secondo grado. No degree is needed, which is what makes this competition the main open door into the central civil service for candidates who did not go to university. Some competition codes restrict entry to diplomas in a defined field, so the profile requirements in the bando have to be read before applying rather than assumed from the headline.
Candidates choose one competition code, and one only. The choice fixes the syllabus, the exam date and the pool of posts the candidate will be ranked against. It cannot be changed after the application closes.
How to apply: inPA, SPID and PEC
Every application goes through inPA, the single national portal for public sector recruitment. There is no paper route and no email route. To reach the application form at all, a candidate first has to authenticate with a digital identity: SPID, the Carta d’Identita Elettronica (CIE), a Carta Nazionale dei Servizi, or eIDAS credentials issued in another EU state. The bando also requires a PEC address, a certified electronic mail account, registered in the candidate’s own name and used as their digital domicile for official communications.
This is the step candidates most often underestimate. SPID is issued by accredited private providers and identity verification can take days, PEC accounts are issued by separate providers and are not the same thing as an ordinary mailbox, and neither can be arranged on the final evening. A participation contribution of 10 euro, non refundable, is paid at the moment the application is sent.
The written test
Selection rests on one written test. It is 40 multiple choice questions in 60 minutes, marked out of 30. The structure is fixed: 25 questions on the exam syllabus, combining a part common to all profiles with a part specific to the profile applied for, 7 questions on logical and critical verbal reasoning, and 8 situational judgement questions about organisational and managerial problems.
The common part covers administrative law, including administrative procedure, the public contracts code, public employment law and personal data protection, elements of criminal law with particular attention to offences against the public administration, and the use of information and communication technologies, including the software the administration itself runs. English at CEFR level A2 and digital competence are also examined as set out in the notice.
For the 2026 cycle the ECO, INF and TEC codes sat on 22 July 2026 and the AMM code, by far the largest, sat across six days from 24 to 31 July 2026. Results for the AMM code were published in August 2026, and a re-correction of one question from the 27 July session was issued in September 2026, a reminder that provisional results are provisional.
What candidates get wrong
Three mistakes recur. Treating the situational questions as common sense rather than a tested subject: they follow organisational behaviour theory and reward preparation. Practising without a clock, when the real constraint is 40 questions in 60 minutes, that is 90 seconds each including the reading. And leaving the digital identity and PEC requirements to the last week, which ends candidacies before they begin.
Dates and post counts change between editions. Check the current bando on inPA and in the Gazzetta Ufficiale Concorsi ed Esami series before relying on any figure here.