A door that had been shut for years

The European Commission has opened something its staff have wanted for a long time. Competition COM/AD/107/2026, Administrators (AD7), is described as the first generalist internal competition ever run at grade AD7. It lets people who already work inside the institution compete their way up into the AD7 bracket without sitting an external EPSO open competition. For a pool that the staff association Generation 2004 estimates at roughly 5,000 eligible colleagues, this is one of the most significant internal openings in years.

It also quietly rewrote the exam. The familiar EPSO reasoning battery is gone, replaced at the first stage by a new adaptive cognitive test run by an outside psychometric provider. If you want the wider context for why EPSO keeps changing its tests, the EPSOlution reform is the backdrop. Plenty of people are preparing for the test they remember rather than the one that now exists, and that is exactly the mistake to avoid.

Everything below draws on the Generation 2004 analysis, which was prepared directly from the notice of competition, and on the official EU Careers materials. One rule applies throughout: the official notice is the only binding source. Where a figure decides your eligibility, confirm it there.

What the reserve list actually gives you

COM/AD/107/2026 is internal, so it is open only to people already employed by the Commission, and it is built to find administrators ready to work at AD7 across the institution. The word that matters is "generalist." Instead of testing one specialism such as audit, law or IT, it looks at the broad administrator skill set: analysis, drafting, coordination, policy work, and the judgement to turn a stack of documents into a clear recommendation. That wide profile is why the eligible group is so large.

The competition produces a reserve list of 100 successful candidates. Be clear about what that list does. It gives you the right to be considered for AD7 posts. It does not hand you a job. Recruiting services inside the Commission draw from the list and run their own steps afterwards. One hundred places against a field of perhaps 5,000 makes this a hard, eliminatory process, and the people who have studied it closely keep repeating the same warning: because the format is new, more candidates fail, often on avoidable errors rather than on ability. The strategic goal is simple to state. Get onto the list of 100.

Who can apply

Eligibility for an internal competition is about your current standing inside the Commission, not about nationality and diplomas in the abstract. It comes in two layers, and you need both.

The first layer is statutory. You must have completed one year in the Commission, of which the last six months were served as an AD official, a temporary agent in the AD function group, or at grade AST5 or above. This is measured against the application deadline, so if your grade or contract changed close to that date, read the wording carefully. Opening the door to temporary agents, not only established officials, is part of what makes this competition notable.

The second layer is about qualifications and relevant experience, meaning experience that lines up with the administrator tasks set out in the notice. You need to meet at least one of these combinations:

• University studies of at least three years, attested by a diploma, plus at least four years of relevant experience.
• University studies of at least four years, attested by a diploma, plus at least three years of relevant experience.
• Completion of the Commission certification programme plus at least four years of relevant experience in the AD function group.
• Vocational training of a level equivalent to a university degree, plus at least four years of relevant experience acquired after the diploma.

The advice that gets repeated most often on this layer is worth taking to heart: explain your experience, do not assume it speaks for itself. Even though the board can see you are a colleague, every period of experience has to be described against the administrator tasks and backed by documents, or it will not count. Candidates routinely undersell themselves. Almost any genuine working experience can be made relevant if you frame it against the tasks listed in the notice.

Where to find the notice, and why it is not on EUR-Lex

This trips people up. There is no Official Journal or EUR-Lex notice for this competition, and that is normal. Competitions with the COM/AD/ prefix are internal Commission competitions run by DG HR for serving staff, and they are not published in the Official Journal. Only open competitions carrying the EPSO/AD/ prefix appear on EUR-Lex.

For an internal competition, the binding notice is issued as a Commission administrative notice and made available to eligible staff through internal channels, namely My IntraComm and the single candidate portal where it is attached to the application itself. It is not posted on a public web page. If you are eligible, open the notice while logged in. The only publicly available document that reproduces its substance is the Generation 2004 analysis, and useful as that is, it is a proxy rather than the binding text.

The application is where easy points get lost

Several of the most common failures happen before any test, inside the form. Claimed work experience has to come with supporting evidence to be taken into account, and each file you attach is capped at 20 MB in PNG, JPG or PDF format. Enter dates cleanly so your timeline reads at a glance. You can edit the application right up to the moment you submit, but once the period closes you cannot change anything except uploading required documents, and the application status has to be confirmed by the deadline. If you reopen a confirmed application, confirm it again. None of this is genuinely complicated. It just punishes procrastination and carelessness.

The four stages

The selection runs as a sequence of eliminatory stages. You clear one to reach the next.

Stage 1: the cognitive reasoning assessment

This is the big change and the first hurdle. An external company that specialises in psychometric testing runs a cognitive assessment of general ability across numerical, inductive and deductive reasoning. It is 24 questions in 36 minutes, and it works differently from the old EPSO tests in ways that matter. It is adaptive, so the difficulty shifts with your performance. Scoring is on a percentile benchmark, and you have to place at or above the 60th percentile of the benchmark population to stay in. There is no negative marking, so leaving a question blank makes no sense. And the difficulty is set by the test author against a benchmark, not by the other people sitting it, which means your job is to perform to your own ceiling rather than to outguess the room.

The item types rhyme with EPSO families but carry twists. Numerical items look like EPSO numerical reasoning, where reading the problem carefully is half the work. The verbal and inductive items pack more detail into less text and include drag and drop construction tasks that reward close reading. The abstract style items share mechanics with EPSO abstract reasoning but use different patterns and add logic linking. Practising on freely available SHL sample materials alongside EPSO banks is the sensible move, and you should train specifically for an adaptive, tightly timed setting where concentration decides the result and nerves are the real enemy.

Stage 2: the written test

The written stage is the case study format in substance: a briefing, summary, policy analysis or action plan built from a supplied dossier of roughly 15 to 25 pages, on any topic. It is judged on a few things done well, namely structure and clarity, actually answering the assignment, and overall quality. Give your text a logical flow, write tight without padding, present the material cleanly, fit it to the intended reader and purpose, and use the documents to address the task. This stage rewards a rehearsed, dependable structure deployed at speed far more than it rewards inspiration. (Some reporting also describes an EU knowledge multiple choice element in the early stages, around 30 questions in 30 minutes; confirm the exact line up in the notice, since the format is new and details have shifted.)

Stage 3: the oral test

The final stage is an oral, understood to combine a presentation and a competency based interview in front of the selection board. For internal candidates this is the moment to turn real working experience into demonstrated competence: reasoning out loud, presenting and defending a position, and showing the behaviours expected of an AD7 administrator.

Do not confuse it with the ICT AD7 open competition

Around the same time, EPSO launched a separate, externally run ICT competition at AD7, and the two should never be mixed up. The ICT competition is open to the public and builds reserve lists across four domains: ICT Infrastructure, ICT Project Management, Clouds and Networks, and Data Science, with one domain per candidate. Its eligibility follows the classic external rules, namely EU nationality and full civic rights, C1 in one official language plus B2 in a second, and a degree paired with relevant experience. If you are serving Commission staff, the generalist internal competition is your route to progress inside the house, while the ICT open competition is the external, specialist path. Different audiences, different rules, different tests.

How to prepare

Because the funnel is eliminatory and the first hurdle is the least familiar, put the cognitive reasoning preparation first. Train numerical, inductive and deductive reasoning together, but rehearse the adaptive, timed experience specifically: about 90 seconds a question, nothing left blank, full concentration. Use SHL samples so the formats, drag and drop included, hold no surprises on the day. The bar is the 60th percentile, so aim for steady strong performance, not merely passable.

For the written test, practise turning a 15 to 25 page dossier into a clear, well ordered product under the clock, with a template you trust: sharp framing, a logically ordered argument, a concise conclusion. For the oral, prepare a tight presentation and a bank of concrete examples from your own work that map onto AD7 competencies, then practise saying your reasoning out loud.

Free orientation exists. Generation 2004, working with Yasemos Europeos, has run free webinars, recordings and study groups on this competition, including working groups for the cognitive and written tests.

Training with EPSO HQ

Two of the stages, the cognitive reasoning assessment and the case study written test, are exactly the kind of EPSO style exercises that EPSO HQ is built to train. The external provider's adaptive format is not identical to the standard EPSO computer based test, but the skills it measures, numerical, inductive and deductive reasoning, are the same families the platform drills, so the practice carries over.

For the reasoning stage, the 1:1 exam simulator reproduces the timed, sterile feel of the real tests, which matters because composure under a tight clock is half the battle; there is a free simulation to try. The Methodology Library lays out a four step pipeline, learn concepts, recognise templates, practise under pressure, then target weaknesses, which fits an adaptive format where steady accuracy beats memorised tricks. Underneath sit the 14 mathematical foundations and the recurring question templates for the numerical items, the abstract reasoning patterns for the inductive items, and the verbal reasoning concepts for the deductive, text heavy items that mirror the drag and drop tasks. The Daily Challenge keeps your speed sharp with a short timed round each day.

For the written case study, the Written Test Guide is the most relevant resource, covering the marking anchors the assessors actually use, a preparation calendar, realistic practice, and a timed plan for working through a documentation pack. For a generalist brief, the chapters on project and programme management and on political affairs and EU policies sit closest to what this stage asks. Three chapters are free, the rest open with a free account, and the video courses cover the same ground.

The bottom line

COM/AD/107/2026 is a rare and valuable opening: a first of its kind internal route to AD7, open to officials and temporary agents alike, with a reserve list of 100 against a field of perhaps 5,000. It is also a redesigned exam, led by an adaptive, percentile scored cognitive test, followed by a case study written test and an oral. The colleagues who do best will be the ones who worked out early that the format changed, who filed meticulous, evidenced applications, and who trained for the test that exists now.