Quiero Ser Maestro is the name Ecuador’s Ministerio de Educacion (MINEDUC) gives to the concurso de merecimientos y oposicion, the merit and opposition competition that is constitutionally the only route into a permanent teaching post in the country’s fiscal (public) school system. Article 228 of Ecuador’s Constitution requires entry into any public career, teaching included, to go through a competitive, merit-based process rather than direct appointment, and the Ley Organica de Educacion Intercultural (LOEI) assigns MINEDUC the job of running that process nationally for every public school in the country, from Educacion Inicial through Bachillerato.
The competition has run in numbered editions since 2013, each one opened by its own convocatoria and scoped to specific levels, specialties and provinces rather than one single nationwide sitting covering every vacancy at once. The eighth edition, Quiero Ser Maestro 8, is the most recent cycle with a concrete sourced applicant figure: according to El Comercio, 16,405 teachers applied for 400 available positions in Educacion General Basica (grades two through seven), and El Mercurio independently reported a closely aligned figure of 17,500 aspirants chasing the same 400 appointments, in reporting on the same 2022-2023 cycle. More recent editions have narrowed in scope rather than grown: a September 2024 call offered 300 appointments for Educacion Inicial and Educacion General Basica, a May 2025 call opened 1,000 positions for Bachillerato Tecnico and English teachers, and a September 2025 call opened 815 positions for Bachillerato General subjects such as Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Language and Literature. No applicant count for these 2024 and 2025 calls has turned up in the reporting checked for this page, so readers should treat the 16,405/17,500 figures as historical, specific to the 2022-2023 cycle, not as a current scale claim.
Before a teacher can apply to any specific convocatoria, MINEDUC requires the status of “apto” (apt), earned through a separate, earlier process of aptitude: a personality test, followed by a written test of general reasoning and the specific knowledge tied to the candidate’s subject and profile. Only teachers who clear that bar are entered into the national banco de elegibles, the eligibility pool from which specific vacancy rounds then draw. A candidate must also hold a third-level degree in Education or a related field registered with SENESCYT, carrying the pedagogical habilitation the MINEDUC profile for that specialty requires, and must be free of the disqualifications the LOSEP and LOEI set for public employment.
Once a candidate is in the banco de elegibles and a specific convocatoria opens, the merecimientos y oposicion stage itself has two further parts: a clase demostrativa, a live teaching demonstration evaluated against published lineamientos for the candidate’s specialty, and a valoracion de meritos that scores additional formal education, training and teaching experience already on file with MINEDUC. The institution’s human talent units adjudicate the resulting ranked list against the open vacancies, and winners receive a nombramiento, Ecuador’s term for the permanent appointment that fixes a teacher inside the public payroll rather than on a temporary contract.
It is worth being precise about what Quiero Ser Maestro is not. It is not Ecuador’s general civil-service entry mechanism: outside teaching, LOSEP routes most public-sector hiring through institution-by-institution concursos de merecimientos y oposicion advertised on the Socio Empleo platform, each one run separately by the hiring entity rather than through one coordinated national exam day, the same decentralized pattern this project found when it researched Mexico’s Servicio Profesional de Carrera and Argentina’s SINEP. Teaching is the exception precisely because MINEDUC centralizes the process: one ministry, one eligibility pool, one published cronograma per convocatoria, and a written knowledge test that is actually administered on a fixed national date rather than left to each hiring office’s own interview panel.