What the Concurso Docente is
The Concurso de Ingreso a la Carrera Docente is the Colombian merit-based selection process for entry into the public education workforce under Decreto Ley 1278 of 2002, the Estatuto de Profesionalizacion Docente. Unlike ordinary CNSC concursos, the docente process bundles vacancies for docentes de aula, docentes lideres de apoyo, directivos docentes rectores and directivos docentes coordinadores across the entidades territoriales certificadas en educacion, which are the departamentos and municipios that hold the delegated authority to run the public schools in their jurisdiction. The Comision Nacional del Servicio Civil, the CNSC, is the coordinating body: it publishes the acuerdo de convocatoria, the anexo tecnico and the OPEC preliminar, opens the SIMO inscription window, and contracts the universidad operadora that applies the pruebas. The Ministerio de Educacion Nacional and the ICFES support the technical design of the pruebas and the certification of subject areas. Direct fetches to cnsc.gov.co, mineducacion.gov.co and icfes.gov.co were blocked from this environment when this page was written, so the figures below were compiled from Colombian coverage and should be re-verified against the acuerdo definitivo before an aspirant relies on them for an inscription.
The scale of it
The convocatoria opened to consulta ciudadana in August 2026 offers on the order of 28,000 vacancies for docentes and directivos docentes, the largest single teaching concurso in the country’s recent history. An earlier planeacion figure filed by the concurso-docente monitoring group CTU-USCTRAB placed the preliminary count at 26,365 vacancies, and national coverage during the socialization phase quoted 26,741 as the first definitivo. The final figure will land in the OPEC that accompanies the acuerdo de convocatoria proper. The 2026 concurso also implements, for the first time, a reserva legal of 7 percent of the vacancies for aspirants with disability, in compliance with Ley 2418 of 2024.
Who can apply
Nationality must be Colombian. The academic requirement is a titulo that authorises the aspirant to teach the area of the empleo: a titulo de licenciado in the discipline, a titulo de normalista superior for the primary and preescolar levels where permitted, or a professional degree with pedagogical training as fixed by the Estatuto and the acuerdo. Directivos docentes have an additional experience requirement of a minimum period of teaching or educational leadership service, as published in the OPEC entry for each cargo. Each aspirant may inscribe to only one empleo, and inscription is exclusively through SIMO on the CNSC portal.
How the process runs
The 2026 concurso keeps the four-stage structure typical of the docente process. First, an eliminatory prueba de aptitudes y competencias basicas, a written test with situational items drawn from the Colombian educational context. Second, a prueba psicotecnica that measures attitudes, interests and motivations relevant to the docente role. Third, the valoracion de antecedentes, which scores educacion formal adicional above the minimum (especializacion, maestria, doctorado) and experiencia docente adicional above the minimum, up to a fixed cap per factor. Fourth, an entrevista, which is applied for docentes and directivos docentes according to the reglas of the acuerdo. The final weighted score orders the aspirants into the lista de elegibles for each empleo, which has a vigencia of two years and is the definitive output that the entidad territorial is required by law to nombrar from.
Provisionales, de carrera and OPEC
A meaningful fraction of Colombian public teachers today hold their posts as provisionales rather than as docentes de carrera: they were appointed to keep a school open while no lista de elegibles existed, and they can be displaced when a concurso finally fills the empleo. The Concurso Docente is the mechanism by which those empleos become carrera. The OPEC, the Oferta Publica de Empleos de Carrera, is the consolidated inventory of every vacancy the process will fill, indexed by entidad territorial, cargo, area, jornada and location. Aspirants should consult the OPEC before choosing an empleo, because the choice determines which vacancy the aspirant competes for and, if they win, which municipio and school they will be nombrado into. The CNSC schedule projects inscripciones to open between November and December 2026 and the aplicacion de pruebas to take place during 2027, in more than fifty cities nationwide.