The 2019 SNA Executive Selection: A Firsthand Account

The notification arrived in my inbox on a Tuesday. No fanfare, just a sterile email from the Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri confirming my admission to the 2019 concorso dirigente SNA. I remember the weight of it—not excitement, but a quiet recognition that the next six months would demand everything. The selection process for the Scuola Nazionale dell’Amministrazione isn’t just an exam; it’s a dissection of how you think under pressure, how you parse ambiguity, and whether you can endure the kind of bureaucratic endurance test that makes marathons look like sprints.

The written exams were first. Three papers: constitutional law, administrative law, and European Union law. I’d spent months buried in Codici and Sentenze, but nothing prepares you for the way the questions twist familiar concepts into knots. One prompt asked to reconcile a 2018 Consiglio di Stato ruling with a 1992 Corte Costituzionale precedent—no context, just the citations. I wrote for four hours straight, my hand cramping, knowing that every comma could be the difference between advancing or being cut. As Professor Sabino Cassese once noted, ‘The Italian public administration doesn’t test knowledge; it tests the ability to perform knowledge under duress.’ That day, I understood what he meant.

The oral phase was worse. A panel of seven—three from SNA, two from the Presidenza, and two external academics—grilled me for 90 minutes. They didn’t ask questions; they launched ambushes. ‘Define the limits of discrezionalità tecnica in the 2017 Legge Madia reforms,’ one said, then interrupted my answer to demand I apply it to a hypothetical ricorso al TAR. I’d practiced with colleagues, but nothing mimics the sensation of seven pairs of eyes judging whether your hesitation is hesitation or incompetence. At one point, a professor slid a printed parere across the table—a real 2019 document from the Consiglio di Stato—and asked me to identify its flaws in under five minutes. I found three. Later, I learned that was the make-or-break moment for half the candidates.

What surprised me most wasn’t the difficulty, but the design of the process. The SNA doesn’t just want lawyers who memorize; it wants administrators who can operationalize law in real time. One written exam included a simulated decreto ministeriale with deliberate errors—typographical, logical, procedural—and required us to redraft it under exam conditions. I’d never seen that in any practice material. It forced me to switch from analyst to draftsman mid-test, a skill I didn’t even know I needed. As former SNA Director General Luigi Marattin wrote in 2020, ‘The selection doesn’t measure what you know; it measures what you can do when what you know isn’t enough.’

The psychological toll was the unspoken fourth phase. Between exams, candidates traded rumors in the halls of the Palazzo Vidoni: ‘They’re only taking 12 this year,’ ‘The Presidenza wants more economists,’ ‘Did you see the Gazzetta Ufficiale errata?’ I stopped checking the forums after a week. The uncertainty wasn’t just about passing—it was about whether the rules themselves might shift. When the final rankings were posted, I found my name at number eight. Not a triumph, but a survival. The email from SNA arrived three days later, cold and official: ‘Congratulazioni. La procedura selettiva è conclusa.’

Looking back, the most valuable lesson wasn’t about law or procedure. It was about the illusion of preparation. You can master every manuale, every past exam, every massima from the Corte dei Conti, but the selection process is engineered to expose gaps you didn’t know existed. The 2019 cycle was particularly brutal—rumors later surfaced that the Presidenza had instructed the commission to prioritize ‘adaptive reasoning’ over rote expertise. Whether that’s true or just another myth from the concorso grapevine, it explains why so many strong candidates faltered on tasks that seemed tangential to the posted syllabus.

I still have the notebook from those months. The margins are filled with frantic scribbles—‘Art. 97 Cost. → merito vs. capacità’, ‘Direttiva 2014/24/UE: soglie?’—and coffee stains that map my stress levels like rings in a tree. The process changed how I read legislation, how I argue, even how I write emails. It wasn’t just a test; it was a reconfiguration. And while I’ll never claim to have enjoyed it, I understand now why the SNA does it this way. Public administration isn’t about knowing the rules; it’s about deciding what to do when the rules collide.