What this exam is
Oman’s Ministry of Education fills its senior-teacher, school-principal, assistant-principal and educational-supervisor posts through a genuine competitive written exam, not through seniority alone or an interview-only process. The Ministry calls these the “electronic candidacy exams” (imtihanat al-tarshih al-electroniya) for educational supervision and school administration positions, and they run under a recruitment guide issued by Ministerial Decision No. 27/2025.
This is worth stating plainly because Oman also runs a much larger, separately reported employment pipeline: the Public Authority for Manpower Register and the general civil-service jobseeker system that news coverage sometimes summarises with headline figures like “56,000 applicants for 1,118 posts.” That general pipeline mixes several selection routes, including some that are interview-based with no written component at all. The exam this page describes is a narrower, confirmed written-test mechanism inside Oman’s education sector specifically, not the general jobseeker headline figure.
Who takes it, and for what
This exam is open to staff already working within Oman’s public education system. It does not hire new teachers from outside the Ministry; instead, it selects among serving teachers for promotion into senior-teacher grade, school leadership (principal and assistant principal) and educational supervision roles (first supervisor, supervisor and subject supervisor) across the Ministry’s educational directorates in each governorate.
For the 2025/2026 academic year round, the Ministry announced 2,500 vacancies across these grades: 1,870 senior-teacher posts, 142 school principal and assistant-principal posts, and 480 first-supervisor and supervisor posts. More than 3,500 candidates applied nationwide for that round, a competitive ratio across a Ministry-wide pipeline rather than a single test centre.
What the exam covers
The electronic exam was designed in cooperation with higher-education institutions, according to the Ministry’s own description, and covers three axes: educational knowledge and information, applied skills and practices, and awareness of recent educational developments. Candidates who clear the electronic exam then sit a technical interview that evaluates professional experience before a final decision on which post they are appointed to.
How it is organised across the country
Rather than one simultaneous national sitting, the Ministry runs the electronic exam in staggered rounds organised by each governorate’s educational directorate. One confirmed regional round, reported separately from the national 2,500-vacancy figure above, put 183 candidates through the competitive exam for supervisory and school-administration posts in Al Dhahirah governorate. A candidate’s own sitting date and venue depend on which directorate they fall under, not on one shared national calendar.
What this page does not yet cover
A single, dated figure for how many candidates sat the exam in Al Dhahirah or any other individual governorate round, beyond the 183-candidate figure above, was not found with a confirmed sitting date in this pass. The full text of the Ministerial Decision No. 27/2025 recruitment guide, which would set out the exact eligibility bar, weighting between the exam and the interview, and age or service-length conditions, was not found in English and could not be directly read, since Oman’s government domains are not reachable from this research pass. Treat the current recruitment guide published by the Ministry of Education as the only authoritative source for a specific round’s conditions, rather than the figures on this page, which describe the most recently confirmed national round.