What the THADS civil servant exam is
Vietnam’s civil service does not hire through one national aggregate exam.
Recruitment runs agency by agency and province by province, and each body
decides for itself whether to fill a post by xet tuyen (an application
review with no written test) or thi tuyen (a standardised written
competitive exam). The Civil Judgment Enforcement Management Department
(Cuc Quan ly Thi hanh an dan su), the Ministry of Justice unit that runs
Vietnam’s network of provincial and municipal Civil Judgment Enforcement
Departments, the agencies that carry out court judgments once a case is
decided, chose the exam route for its 2025 recruitment round. It is one of
the largest single thi tuyen cycles run by any Vietnamese government body
in a given year, because it recruits centrally for its own headquarters and
for every provincial and municipal office nationwide in one coordinated
round rather than leaving each office to recruit on its own.
Who can apply
A candidate must hold Vietnamese nationality and currently reside in Vietnam, and must be at least 18 years old on the date of application. The 2025 round, opened under Notice No. 214/TB-CQLTHADS and Decision No. 505/QD-CQLTHADS, covered 986 posts split between the Department’s Hanoi headquarters (9 posts, in general affairs, complaint resolution and IT management) and provincial and municipal Civil Judgment Enforcement Departments across the country. The academic qualification required is set per advertised post rather than by one rule for the whole round: a law degree for the professional cadres that do the enforcement work itself, such as Chap hanh vien (enforcement officer) and Tham tra vien (reviewing officer), and other degrees, in accounting, information technology or public administration, for support cadres. Every candidate confirmed to meet the conditions and standards for their post must also pay a 300,000 VND exam fee by a stated deadline before sitting the exam.
How the exam is structured
The exam runs in two rounds. Round 1 is a computer-based multiple-choice test of 60 questions in 60 minutes, covering reasoning and applied-knowledge ability, general understanding of Vietnam’s political system and state administrative management, and the rights, duties and professional ethics of a civil servant. A candidate must answer at least half the questions correctly to advance. Round 2 is a written professional-subject exam testing the specialist knowledge the advertised post actually requires, so its content differs between a law post, an accounting post and an IT post. Final ranking within each advertised position combines a candidate’s Round 1 and Round 2 scores; sourced coverage of this round does not add an interview stage on top of the two written rounds.
Scale and results
Registration for the 986 posts ran from 20 November to 19 December 2025. On 29 January 2026 the Recruitment Council published Notice No. 50/TB-HDTD, the result of checking every submitted application form against the conditions and standards for its post: 4,804 candidates were confirmed eligible and summoned to sit the exam, while 122 were found not to meet the requirements, a combined pool of 4,926 applications for 986 posts, a ratio of roughly five candidates for every post. Eligible candidates were given until 17:00 on 2 February 2026 to pay the exam fee. The Council published exam results by test site as each site’s marking finished; its result for the Ho Chi Minh City site, Notice No. 63/TB-HDTD, was published on 9 February 2026. Sourced coverage of this round did not carry one single combined national result covering every test site at once, so no single national pass count is stated here rather than assumed.
How to prepare
Because Round 1 is a fixed-format, fixed-time multiple-choice test rather than an open-ended interview, practicing timed multiple-choice questions on Vietnam’s state administrative structure, the legal framework governing civil servants (their rights, duties and professional ethics), and general reasoning and applied-knowledge questions is the most direct preparation for that round. Round 2’s content depends entirely on the post applied for, so a candidate sitting for a law-cadre post such as Chap hanh vien should prepare the substantive and procedural law the post actually applies, while a candidate applying for an accounting, IT or administrative-support post should prepare that post’s own professional syllabus rather than general legal knowledge.
Sources and re-verification
Every figure here, the 986 vacancies, the 4,804-eligible/122-ineligible screening result, the exam’s two-round structure and the Ho Chi Minh City result date, comes from the Civil Judgment Enforcement Management Department’s own 2025 recruitment notices and a cross-check against independent legal-news coverage of the same round. Vietnam’s civil service runs this kind of recruitment agency by agency rather than on one fixed annual national calendar, so these figures describe the 2025 round specifically and will not automatically carry over to a later round. Re-verify any vacancy count, deadline or exam-format detail against thads.moj.gov.vn’s current recruitment notices before relying on it for a live application.