EU Policy Careers
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Thanks Jacob! The hiring process is indeed inflexible & slow. Entering into a full time position can be tricky outside the clearly defined job postings you mention - and those come along relatively rarely, and if not part of a bigger hiring drive, mostly don't even reach the public but are advertised within the Commission only.
That is why the Blue Book traineeship is quite interesting beyond early career exploration, as it is often the only chance to get a foot in the door, hear about open position or build a network that would flag open positions later on or hire you based on your reputation. I would say that a fairly large majority of younger people in the Commission (maybe >70% of under 30s to give a number, but low confidence) start through the Blue Book traineeship.
Retention probability is indeed low (maybe 10 - 20% of trainees per cohort get to stay on). But you are more likely to get an offer for a full-time role with some work experience, as hiring managers will appreciate your skills - which is why it can actually be a good strategy not to do the traineeship right after you graduate but with 1-2 years of work experience (though note you can only apply to the JPP with less than 3 years of work experience after your Bachelor's). As a side note, it's also easier to stay on if you have a background in a technical field/law/economics - fields that are seen as giving you hard skills, in contrast to many trainees that have a political science/policy degree.
Finally, given the intense competition for the AD5 generalist concours, it generally requires significant preparation to pass. Specialist concours require a specific degree and some work experience (most often either 3 or 6/7 years), so there is less competition. It is a good idea to keep an eye on upcoming selection procedures here: https://eu-careers.europa.eu/en/upcoming-selection-procedures
The blue book internship is indeed the most common way to get started, especially for recent grads. So would require salary cut for the 5 months of the internship programme, but if you manage to stay on after that on a temporary contract, looking at net monthly salaries of ~€3.000 - 4.000.
If you manage to enter through the AD5 generalist competition mentioned above (or another field-specific competition), you start directly at the ~€6.000 net monthly salary mentioned in the post (or higher for field-specific competitions, which generally require some years of work experience to apply).
The European Parliament recently submitted a parliamentary question on wild animal welfare! The question focuses on human caused wild animal suffering and such questions generally don't have policy implications - but still, was surprised to see this topic being taken up in policy discourse.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-004965_EN.html
The EU became the first major region or country globally to propose mandatory DNA synthesis screening! If the law is adopted, companies need to screen customers for orders of synthetic DNA of dangerous viruses, raising the barrier to the development of bioweapons and potentially setting a global standard for other countries.
I think you made a mistake in calculating summary statistic #3, claiming that the US government makes up the bulk of government biosecurity spending globally. Using a yearly rather than the 5-yearly figure you seem to use for US government spending, the US share in global biosecurity government spending seems closer to 25% rather than the 90% you suggest.
It seems that you used the $88.2bn figure from this White House source you quote below as an estimate for the US government annual biosecurity budget. However, the source explains that the $88.2 billion is a 'request for mandatory funding available over five years', not annually. Further, this is only the requested budget by the Biden administration, not the final spending figure. Not exactly sure on this, but the actual levels of funding are (likely?) to be (significantly?) lower after the budget passes Congress.
A better figure would be the estimates by the Council on Strategic Risks on biosecurity spending in past years - e.g. $23bn for 2023 (which also include DoD spending in addition to HHS, NIH, ASPR, FDA, USAID and CDC from the White House Source).
Taking your very rough estimate of $100bn global annual government spending on biosecurity as given, this would result in the US only making up ca. 25% of global biosecurity government spending rather than 90%. Intuitively, the 25% figure perhaps underestimates the role of the US government - perhaps as the $100bn global sum seems a bit high, but low confidence on both of those statements, further research here would be very interesting.
However, correcting the 90% figure downwards seems like an important correction to the piece and its conclusions, as the GCBR policy community is arguably already disproportionately focused on the US/UK, with biosecurity policy in other parts of the world still neglected.
Im case you haven't seen it, the EU AI Office has for technology specialists, applications closing tomorrow:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/job-opportunities-european-ai-office
Thank you, glad it's helpful!
I think the Impactful Policy Careers workshop is a great way to dive deeper into the topic and connect with other EAs interested and working in the field.
Degrees from other prestigious schools in policy-related subjects (LSE, Sciences Po, Harvard Kennedy school, Oxford Blavatnik, etc.) can also give you an advantage and you meet many people having graduated from those in Brussels. I mentioned the College of Europe specifically as it is explicitly training graduates for EU policy and the network you can build there will be very relevant. I don't know about online degrees - I'm not very confident they would distinguish your CV much, but the right ones might be a good learning opportunity.
UPDATE: The notice for the AD5 competition was published today - Deadline is 10 March 2026. You should fill in the initial application thoroughly, with correct dates for all work experiences and diplomas (studies, languages, etc.). You will need to submit those should you be successful.
1490 people will make it to the reserve list (from which you can be directly recruited as a lifetime civil servant), as opposed to 147 in the last such competition in 2019. Assuming a similar number of applicants as in 2019 (~25k) the probability of making it onto the reserve list would be a lot higher for this competition, around 5%.