What this competition is
Egypt has no single flagship civil service exam the way India has SSC CGL or Bangladesh has the BCS. Public sector hiring instead runs through many separately named, separately scheduled recruitment competitions, called “musabaqa,” each run by the Central Agency for Organization and Administration (CAOA), sometimes jointly with the ministry that owns the vacancies. Between January and August 2025 alone, CAOA reported holding centralised competitions for more than 130,000 posts across the government, drawing over half a million applicants in total. This page covers one of those competitions, not a unified national exam, because no such single exam exists for Egypt.
The competition covered here is the one CAOA and the Ministry of Education and Technical Education launched on 2 July 2022 to contract 30,000 teachers nationwide, still referred to in Egyptian coverage as the “30,000 teachers” plan even though it now runs as a series of subject and grade specific waves rather than one single sitting. It is a genuinely competitive, written-exam based selection process, not a CV or interview based hire, which is why it earns its own page on a site built around exams candidates prepare for.
How the competition actually runs
Rather than one annual exam day, CAOA opens a fresh, separately numbered wave whenever a batch of teaching vacancies needs filling, each announced for a specific subject, grade band or region. Recent examples from 2025 include waves for 5,500 assistant teacher posts, 9,354 assistant teacher posts in English, and 7,016 assistant teacher posts in science, each announced on its own date with its own applicant pool. Candidates only sit the exam tied to the specific announcement they registered against.
Each wave follows the same three stages. First, a written competitive exam, administered electronically and set by CAOA, tests subject specific pedagogical and content knowledge. Candidates who clear it move to a medical examination and a physical fitness test, which includes push-ups, abdominal exercises, a 100 metre run within 20 seconds, and a height and weight check, along with drug screening. Candidates who clear both stages then join a qualifying educational and psychological training programme run by their local education directorate before they are formally appointed.
That physical and medical stage has also been the subject of real, documented controversy. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), an independent human rights organisation, has reported and pursued court appeals for candidates who passed the written exam but were later excluded from appointment on medical or physical grounds, including obesity, height, pregnancy and recent childbirth. That is reported fact, not this page’s own editorial position, and it is worth knowing before assuming that passing the written exam alone secures the post.
Who is eligible
CAOA restricts each wave to Egyptian nationals, and each individual announcement sets its own age cap, stated as not exceeding 40 years old on the date the announcement is published. The qualification bar is degree specific: most waves require a degree from the relevant department of a Faculty of Education or Faculty of Specific Education matching the grade and subject applied for, though subject specific waves aimed at graduates outside education have accepted a relevant subject degree plus an educational diploma. An overall grade of “Acceptable” (maqbul) or higher in the qualifying degree is required across the waves reported here. Applying costs a modest fee, 26 Egyptian pounds, paid by deposit into CAOA’s account at one of a short list of named banks.
Checking your own status
Because the competition runs as many separate, subject specific waves rather than one shared calendar, a candidate’s own result, exam schedule and appointment status are looked up individually through CAOA’s government jobs portal, not published as a single general timetable. CAOA has also continued to open new nomination rounds from the waiting lists of earlier 2025 waves well into 2026, so a candidate who did not clear an announcement outright can still be nominated later from that same wave’s waiting list.
What this page does not yet cover
No single, sourced figure for the total number of applicants or the total number of confirmed vacancies across every current wave of this competition was found in the research behind this page; CAOA reports scale for its entire competition system, not broken out consistently by named competition. The exact qualification bar, age cap and required documents also vary between individual announcements rather than sitting in one fixed rule, so the current CAOA announcement for the specific wave and subject you are applying to remains the only reliable source for its own requirements. Because Egypt runs many of these named campaigns rather than one flagship exam, other CAOA competitions covering different roles are not covered on this page and would need their own entities if they clear the same sourcing bar.