Imran Khan, PMS Ministerial Topper, shares his full first-person account: why he skipped academies, trained under Sir Kazim, and what came after.
The day the result came out, my phone didn’t stop buzzing for about six hours. That part I expected. What I didn’t expect was who was doing the buzzing.
Half the congratulatory posts came from people I recognized: my colleague, my seniors in the department, a couple of friends who’d been checking in on me for months. The other half came from academy pages I had never visited, WhatsApp groups I had never joined, and at least two “coaching centers” that, as far as I could tell, had no idea I existed until the PPSC notification went up with my name on it. One of them used my photo in an ad within forty-eight hours. I never sent it to them.
I sat with that for a while before I understood what was actually going on. This article is me trying to explain it properly, not just the exploitation part, though that’s coming, but the whole thing, from the day I decided to sit for the PMS Ministerial exam to the day strangers started claiming a share of it.
Where I Started: An Engineer With a Writing Problem
I’m not from a humanities background. I studied engineering, and by the time I decided to go for the PMS Ministerial quota, I was already serving as a Sub-Inspector in Punjab Police. On paper, I was exactly the kind of candidate the ministerial quota is built for: in-service, the right pay scale, the right number of years behind me, a Master’s degree that satisfied the eligibility criteria.
What I wasn’t, was a writer.
I could hold a technical conversation, write a decent departmental report and explain a procedure clearly enough. None of that prepared me for the English essay paper in the PMS Ministerial exam, which expects you to build an argument from scratch, hold it together for two and a half hours, and make an examiner who’s read four hundred similar essays that week actually want to keep reading yours. I didn’t know how to construct a thesis. I didn’t know what made one paragraph follow logically from another instead of just sitting next to it.
Confidence wasn’t the problem going in; I had plenty of that walking into other parts of my life. It evaporated the moment I sat down with a blank page and a topic I had no plan for.
It was a colleague of mine, a fellow PMS qualifier who’d been through Sir Syed Kazim Ali‘s course himself, who first told me to stop trying to fix this alone. I’ll be honest, I brushed him off the first time. I thought I could read a few model essays, copy the structure, and get by. But I was wrong, and it took me a few wasted weeks to admit it.
Why I Didn’t Join any Officer-run Academy
The first reason came from watching my own colleagues who’d gone the officer-run route ahead of me. Almost every one of them said some version of the same thing: the officers running these circles guided you exactly as much as you’d paid for, and not a rupee more. Want more time, more correction, more attention on your outline? Pay for the next package. That’s not mentorship, that’s a transaction wearing mentorship’s clothes, and it showed in how thin the actual writing correction turned out to be once you were in the door.
A senior officer might stand in front of a room and tell you what worked for him, once, in a group session. That’s not the same as someone sitting with your outline at eleven at night, telling you exactly where your third paragraph lost the thread, because that kind of attention wasn’t part of the package you’d bought. Selfless mentorship and paid-by-the-hour guidance don’t look the same from the outside, but they behave very differently once you’re actually stuck on a weak thesis at week six.
There was also a second, more practical reason I stayed away from an academy circuit altogether. I was still in service. I needed a preparation approach I could fit around an existing job, not a full-time academy schedule built for someone with nothing else on their plate. That ruled out most of the academies by default; they weren’t built for people like me.
And there was a third reason, which took me longer to articulate but matters just as much: I didn’t think an officer who had already passed was automatically qualified to teach me how to pass; I have talked about it in detail in my review.
I believe a senior can tell you what worked for them. That’s not nothing; I still listened to a lot of that advice, and some of it was genuinely useful. But their success came from their own background, their own reading habits, their own way of thinking, and none of that automatically transfers into being able to diagnose why my introduction was weak, or why my argument kept losing relevance halfway through the body paragraph. Teaching writing is a different skill from writing well yourself, and I didn’t want to bet eight months of preparation on the assumption that those two things were the same.
Why One or Two Months Was Never Going to Be Enough
Before I go further into the training itself, I want to flag something that I think trips up more ministerial-quota candidates than anything else on this list: the exam has no fixed calendar. The PPSC announces the PMS ministerial quota only when vacancies open in the cadre, which means most eligible employees don’t know exactly when to start. A lot of people wait for the advertisement, then try to cram everything into the six or eight weeks before the paper.
I understand the temptation. In those six weeks, you can genuinely learn the shape of an essay: introduction, body, conclusion, maybe a decent thesis statement. What you can’t learn in that time is the actual skill the paper is testing: staying on topic when the prompt is phrased in a way you didn’t expect, connecting paragraphs so they build on each other instead of just sitting in a row, and sustaining one argument across the full length of the paper without losing the thread. That’s not a checklist skill. It’s closer to a muscle, and muscles don’t build in six weeks.
Therefore, I gave myself eight to twelve months. Not because I thought I was slow, but because I’d watched enough people around me treat this like a sprint and come out the other side with essays that had the right shape yet none of the substance.
Starting From Zero With Sir Kazim
I joined Sir Syed Kazim Ali’s English Essay and Precis Course genuinely starting from zero on the writing side. The first stretch of the course wasn’t about content or arguments at all; it was about English itself, sentence by sentence, before we ever got near a full essay. That order mattered more than I expected it to. You can’t build a strong argument in a language you’re still fighting to control.
Once the fundamentals were solid, the actual craft training began: how to decode what a topic is really asking rather than what it appears to be asking on the surface, how to frame a thesis statement that’s precise instead of vague, how to build topic sentences that actually carry an argument forward instead of just introducing a new paragraph, how to write an evidence in a body paragraph. Transitions stopped being decorative connector words and became something I used deliberately, to make one idea earn the next one.
What made the difference, more than any single technique, was that the feedback didn’t stop when the formal course ended. Sir Kazim kept reviewing my outlines and my precis work well past the point where I was technically still “his student,” right up until my exam. I’ve spoken to people who did short courses elsewhere and got detailed feedback for exactly as long as they were paying for it. This wasn’t that.
After the direct mentoring tapered off, I went into a self-study phase, not learning new material, but applying everything I’d been taught, on my own, repeatedly, until it stopped feeling like a technique I was consciously reaching for and started feeling like how I naturally wrote.
The Readymade-Notes Trap I Watched Others Fall Into
I want to spend a section on this because I saw it wreck more preparations than almost anything else, and it’s tempting precisely because it looks like a shortcut.
Plenty of aspirants collect ready-made outlines, pre-written essays, notes passed around in office WhatsApp groups from whoever cleared the exam last cycle. It feels like progress. You’ve got a folder full of “good” material, and that folder makes you feel prepared. The problem shows up in the exam hall, when the actual topic doesn’t match anything in that folder. Borrowed material has no way to adapt to a prompt that’s been twisted, broadened, or narrowed from what you memorized. You’re stuck.
There’s a slower kind of damage too, one that’s easier to miss until it’s too late. If you’re always working from someone else’s outline, you never develop the judgment to decide for yourself what belongs in an essay and what doesn’t. That judgment is the actual skill being tested. Examiners read hundreds of essays in a sitting, and recycled outlines are obvious to them almost instantly; they read as recycled, because they are.
I made a deliberate choice not to build a stockpile of memorized essays. I built a stockpile of practice instead.
What “Mock Interviews” Actually Meant for Me
Once I was through the writing side, I ran into a second version of the same exploitation pattern I’d sensed with the academies, this time around the mock interviews. There’s a whole informal economy of people who will offer to run a mock interview with you: some are scammers charging a fee for essentially nothing; others are academy staff dressed up as “subject specialists” or “evaluators” with no real credentials to evaluate anything.
I stayed away from all of it. What I actually did instead was less glamorous and gets advertised a lot less: speaking out loud, alone in my room, on questions I hadn’t planned for in advance, until I could put a coherent answer together on the spot instead of freezing. I practiced holding eye contact with an imaginary panel across the table, controlling my pace so nerves didn’t turn into rambling, and getting comfortable sitting with a short silence instead of filling it with filler words.
Not only this, I also made myself answer the kind of questions a real panel throws without warning: questions about my own service record, questions built to catch a contradiction, questions about something in the news that had nothing to do with anything I’d revised.None of that is something you can memorize your way through beforehand. It’s a live, spoken skill, built by speaking out loud, under a bit of manufactured pressure, again and again, not by rehearsing a script.
The only structured mock interview practice I did that actually resembled the real thing was over phone calls with Sir Kazim directly: him asking, me answering on the spot, no script to fall back on; no panel; no audience; no paid circuit. Just calls.
The Mindset Sir Kazim Actually Trained
The most useful thing I learned in that interview prep wasn’t a technique; it was a reframe. Sir Kazim was blunt about it: the interview is a confidence test before it’s a knowledge test. Nobody is going to catch you out on a fact you don’t know. What they are testing is whether you can hold your ground and speak like someone who belongs in the room.
The specific instruction he gave me, which I carried into the actual interview almost word for word, was this: “Walk in and prove you’re the best fit for the institution, not as someone asking to be picked.” There’s a real difference between those two postures, and interview panels can tell which one they’re looking at within the first minute.
He put it to me once, and it’s stuck with me since: “The institution needs you.” Not the other way around. It sounds like a small shift in framing, but it changes how you sit, how you answer, and how much you hedge. I went in believing that line.
How I Chose My Mentor
I get asked fairly often how I decided on Sir Kazim for my PMS Ministerial Essay and Precis preparation over the alternatives, so it’s worth laying out plainly.
I judged on four things. Could this person take something genuinely difficult and make it simple, without dumbing it down? Did his past students show measurable improvement, not just praise him, but actually write better, think better, perform better after working with him? Did his teaching hold up over a long preparation cycle, or was he only impressive in a single lecture or a viral clip? And did he give honest, specific correction, pointing at exactly what was wrong with a piece of writing, instead of vague encouragement that felt good but taught nothing?
That’s also why I weighed advice from already-qualified officers more carefully than most people around me did. A senior can tell a compelling story about their own journey. That’s real, and I don’t dismiss it. But it’s not the same as being able to sit with your writing and tell you precisely why your third paragraph loses the thread. If you’re choosing a mentor, ask for evidence of that second thing, not just the first.
The Day the Result Came Out
Back to where this started. The day the result of PMS Ministerial Quota Exams 2025 came out, I got congratulated by a lot of people who’d earned the right to be part of that moment: my colleague who pointed me toward Sir Kazim in the first placeand my family, people who’d watched me put in the actual hours.
And then there was everyone else: academy pages, unfamiliar groups, accounts I’d never interacted with, all posting my name and photo as if I’d walked through their doors. It was disorienting in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I’d spent eight to twelve months building something almost entirely in private, late nights, corrected outlines, calls with one mentor, and within a day of the result, that private effort had a dozen public claimants.
That’s where I started asking the question that this whole article is really about: why?
Why Academies Chase Passed Candidates for Free Interviews and Photos
Here’s the mechanism, as plainly as I can put it, based on what I pieced together from that experience and conversations with other candidates who went through the same thing.
An academy’s marketing depends on passing faces. If an academy’s actual student base isn’t producing many genuine passes, and from what I could see, a lot of them aren’t, a large share of the “results” they claim never sat through their full course. That said, they still need passing candidates attached to their name to stay credible in a crowded market.
And the fastest, cheapest way to get that is to approach people after the written result is public, when your success is already confirmed and low-risk to attach to, and offer something that costs the academy very little: a free mock interview, maybe a small gift, in exchange for association. A photo. A testimonial. A name they can put next to their brand.
To put it in clear words: if an academy doesn’t have its own passed students, it spends money on outsiders instead, so it can extract a claim to their success.
I don’t think this is illegal or even unusual as a marketing tactic. But I do think it’s worth naming clearly, because it creates a signal in the market that has nothing to do with teaching quality. The academy that shouts loudest about its “results” after every cycle isn’t necessarily the one that produced them. It’s often the one that’s best at collecting them after the fact. Aspirants comparing academies by their result claims are frequently comparing marketing budgets, not teaching outcomes.
The Quiet Part: Personality Over Knowledge
There’s a smaller, quieter version of the same pattern that I think matters just as much. A lot of what this circuit optimizes for isn’t a well-prepared candidate. It’s a presentable one: someone who photographs well, speaks confidently on camera, and looks good in a congratulatory post. Personality, in other words, not knowledge.
I understand why that happens. Personality is what shows up in a thirty-second reel. The eight months of outline corrections and precis drafts don’t make for good marketing content. But it’s worth being honest with yourself about which one actually got you through the exam, because it wasn’t the camera-ready version. For me, it was the unglamorous part: the discipline built over eight to twelve months, sentence by sentence, correction by correction.
What This Means If You’re Still Preparing
If you’re eligible for the ministerial quota and starting to think seriously about preparation, here’s what I’d actually tell you, in the order I’d tell you.
First, confirm your eligibility properly, and don’t rely on last year’s cutoff. Service years, pay scale requirements, and qualification criteria shift slightly between advertisements, so check the current requirement directly on the PPSC’s official website before you assume anything about your own standing.
Second, expect the free-offer approach once your written result is public, and go in knowing what it usually is before you decide whether to accept it. There’s nothing wrong with taking a free mock interview if you want one; just know what it’s actually buying the other side.
Third, keep the competition numbers in perspective. In my batch, the real competitive circle looked more like seven to ten serious candidates per senior aspirant’s network, inside a pool of five to six hundred genuine competitors overall. Most of what looks like a crowd on social media is noise, not people you’re actually up against. Don’t let secondhand signals, like an academy’s popularity, a senior officer’s casual recommendation, or general social proof, replace your own judgment about who’s actually teaching you something.
Fourth, treat the General Ability paper as a daily habit rather than a cram subject. It covers General Knowledge, Pakistan Affairs, English Grammar, and Islamic Studies or Ethics, and none of those reward a two-week sprint. HowTests has downloadable MCQ books and mock tests built exactly for this kind of spaced, ongoing practice, and I used them consistently to track where I actually stood instead of guessing.
Fifth, if precis writing specifically is where you’re weakest, PrecisWritingLet is worth using: it’s a free platform with solved precis passages going back decades, written and reviewed by Sir Kazim himself.
Sixth, don’t neglect the Urdu essay or the psychological assessment. It’s easy to pour everything into the English paper because that’s where the anxiety concentrates and lose ground on the pieces that get less attention.
Key Takeaways
- One or two months is never enough. Essay writing is a standing discipline, not something you switch on once the PPSC announces vacancies.
- Readymade outlines and borrowed notes create the illusion of preparation, not the actual capability the exam tests.
- Free interview offers that show up after your written result is out are usually about the academy’s brand, not your benefit; know the mechanism before you accept one.
- Confidence and the “prove you’re right for the institution” framing were trained deliberately. I didn’t walk in with that instinct; I was taught it by Sir Syed Kazim Ali.
- Mock interviews outside a verified mentor relationship are frequently run by people with no real standing to evaluate you.
- Self-practice and independent argument-building mattered more to my result than any mock circuit did.
- A lot of the coaching industry around this exam rewards visibility after the fact, not preparation before it. Choose your mentor by evidence of student improvement, not by how loudly they advertise once your name is already on a merit list.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it actually take to prepare for the PMS Ministerial English paper?
Based on my own experience, meaningfully useful preparation runs somewhere between eight months and a year, particularly for essay and precis writing. A four-to-eight-week sprint can teach you the basic shape of an essay but won’t build the argumentative control the paper actually tests.
Why do academies offer free interview prep after PMS or CSS results are announced?
Often because their own student base isn’t producing many genuine passes, and attaching a real, already-successful candidate to their name after the fact is a low-cost way to build credibility they didn’t earn through teaching.
How can I tell if a mock interview or evaluator is legitimate?
Ask what their actual credentials are to evaluate a ministerial or civil service interview specifically, and be cautious of anyone offering it for free immediately after a result is public with no prior relationship to your preparation.
Is personality more important than knowledge in the PMS or CSS interview?
From what Sir Syed Kazim Ali taught me, confidence and framing matter a great deal, and they can be trained. But they’re not a substitute for the writing and reasoning discipline the written papers test first. Don’t mistake a well-marketed personality for actual preparation.
Should I rely on readymade outlines or notes from officers who already qualified?
Use them as reference points at most. A senior’s advice is useful for motivation and general direction, but it can’t correct your specific writing weaknesses the way a mentor who reviews your actual work can.
What should I look for when choosing a mentor for essay and precis writing?
Look for someone who simplifies difficult material rather than just sounds impressive, whose past students show measurable improvement, whose teaching holds up over months rather than one good lecture, and who gives specific, honest correction instead of general motivation.
Where can I find MCQ practice and precis resources for PMS Ministerial preparation?
HowTests offers downloadable MCQ books and mock tests for the General Ability paper, and PrecisWritingLet offers free, solved precis passages for writing practice, both currently live for aspirants to use.
Imran Khan is an Assistant Commissioner who qualified the PMS Ministerial Exams 2025 after training under Sir Syed Kazim Ali. This is his complete first-person account of that preparation.
