On April 13, 2025, thousands of in-service government employees across Punjab walked into examination halls to attempt the screening paper of the PMS Ministerial Quota Examination: an exam so competitive that even after the first filter, 5,772 candidates remained in the race for just 21 posts. When the dust settled, and the merit list was announced, the name at the very top belonged to a serving police officer: Sub Inspector Imran Khan, an engineer by qualification, who had prepared for the entire examination without setting foot in a single academy. Today, he serves as an Assistant Commissioner.
His achievement alone would make his story worth telling. What makes it worth studying, however, is what he did after the result: when academies he had never joined began circulating his photograph to claim credit for a success they had no part in, a practice he publicly confronted and one we shall examine later in this article. But first, his journey deserves to be told the way it actually happened, not as an advertisement but as a preparation manual written in lived experience.
A CSS-25 Written Qualifier’s Experience with Sir Kazim
Hammad Barkat, a government officer and CSS-25 written qualifier, shares how Sir Kazim’s Essay and Precis writing techniques, structured methodology, and evaluation transformed his English preparation and helped him tackle the toughest paper in CSS.
Who Is Imran Khan, and What Odds Did He Beat?
Imran Khan did not arrive at this examination with any natural advantage in its most decisive skill. He is an engineer by education and was serving as a Sub Inspector when he decided to compete for the Provincial Management Service through the Ministerial Quota, a reserved pathway open only to in-service government employees who already hold a regular post and meet strict service and qualification requirements. In other words, his competition was not fresh graduates; it was thousands of experienced government servants, many of whom had attempted the exam before and knew its terrain well.
The examination itself is deceptively compact but ruthlessly selective. Candidates first clear an objective General Knowledge paper, covering Pakistan Affairs, Current Affairs, English Grammar, and Islamiat or Ethics, among other areas. Survivors then face the two papers on which the competition truly turns, the English Essay and the Urdu Essay, before the final stage of psychological assessment and viva voce. For a complete breakdown of the exam's structure, phases, and unpredictable schedule, read What Is the PMS Ministerial Exam, and When Is It Conducted? And for a practical preparation roadmap drawn from his journey, CSSPrepForum has published PMS Ministerial Quota Exam Guidance: What an Assistant Commissioner's Journey Actually Teaches Aspirants.
Imran Khan secured 1st position in this field despite his greatest weakness; he has openly admitted that organising ideas, framing a thesis, and sustaining coherence in an essay once felt beyond him. The question every serious aspirant should ask is not "how talented was he?" It is "what did he do differently?"
Why He Refused to Join Any Academy
The answer begins with a decision he made before opening a single book. As a serving officer, Imran Khan had observed the commercial side of the CSS and PMS preparation industry from a vantage point most aspirants never get. He had watched how certain academies and certain officers form convenient alliances: the academy gains a famous face for its advertisements, the officer gains a platform and a fee, and the aspirant gains little beyond an expensive seat in a crowded hall. He had also seen the results of that arrangement firsthand. By his own account, many candidates he personally knew who joined academies or officer-led coaching programmes could not even clear the written examination.
So he made a clear-eyed decision. His written preparation would be entirely self-driven. The only teacher he would formally join was Sir Syed Kazim Ali on a colleague’s recommendation and only for English, the one skill he knew he could not correct on his own.
A distinction matters here, and it is one aspirants often blur. A mentor is not an academy. An academy sells enrolment; a mentor guides correction: the patient, repeated, honest diagnosis of what is wrong with your writing and thinking. Imran Khan rejected the first and invested everything in the second. His success is not an argument against guidance; it is an argument against guidance that has been replaced by marketing.
Want to Know Who Sir Syed Kazim Ali Is?
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How He Prepared: Writing First, Everything Else After
Most aspirants prepare backwards. They spend months accumulating content, such as notes, facts, current affairs, subject material, and leave writing for the end, treating it as a formality of presentation. Imran Khan inverted that sequence entirely, and this inversion is arguably the single most instructive element of his preparation.
He began with Sir Syed Kazim Ali's English Essay and Precis Course and gave himself eight to twelve months, devoting the first five to six to nothing but his written expression: decoding what a topic actually demands, constructing a precise thesis, building paragraphs that prove their claims, and connecting arguments with deliberate transitions, all of it practised under Sir Kazim's evaluation right up to exam day. Only after his writing had matured did he turn to the remaining content of the examination.
The result surprised even him. The remaining papers, from the General Knowledge syllabus to the Urdu essay, became dramatically easier to understand, organise, and deliver because he now possessed the architecture into which all knowledge fits. He already knew how an examiner reads, how an argument is structured, and how a page must flow. In his own reflection, the analytical skills he built under Sir Kazim's mentorship equipped him to prepare every other subject independently, without any coaching at all.
The lesson for aspirants is profound: English writing is not one paper among many. It is the operating system on which every other paper runs. Master the skill first, and the content organises itself; hoard the content first, and no amount of knowledge will save an incoherent answer sheet. You can read his complete account of this transformation in his full student review.
Mock Tests: What Is Sold vs. What Actually Works
Nowhere is the gap between commerce and preparation wider than in the business of mock tests. Across Pakistan, aspirants pay handsomely for "mock series" that arrive with an impressive schedule and depart without the only thing that gives a mock any value: genuine, expert evaluation. A test that is taken, submitted, and never meaningfully corrected is not preparation. It is a donation.
Imran Khan understood what a mock is actually for. Its purpose is not to collect more content; it is to build time management and examination temperament. It should teach you, under real pressure, what a paper expects and how you are going to deliver it within the clock. That skill cannot be purchased; it can only be practised.
Under Sir Kazim's guidance, he built his own mock regime. He took the past papers of the last three PMS Ministerial examinations and solved them as complete mocks under fully timed, real-exam conditions: no pauses, no references, no second attempts. Each sitting trained his pacing, his composure, and his judgment about where to invest minutes and where to economise. By examination day, the hall held no surprises for him, because he had already sat the exam several times in his own study.
For aspirants, the rule that emerges is simple. Take mocks only where subject specialists provide genuine and prompt evaluation of your attempt, or run disciplined, honestly timed self-mocks using authentic past papers. Howtests provides free past papers, MCQ books, and mock tests built precisely for this kind of self-assessment, and he has credited these downloadable resources with helping him track his own progress throughout his preparation.
After the Result: When the Academies Came Calling
Then came the written result, and with it, the ritual that follows every announcement in Pakistan. Academies he had never joined approached him with offers of free interview preparation, gifts, and promotion. The arrangement is an open secret in the preparation industry: instead of investing in the students who actually paid them, some academies invest in the toppers who did not. They purchase interviews, endorsements, and photographs after the fact, so that next year's aspirants believe the success was manufactured in their classrooms. It is a machinery Imran Khan has since dissected himself, in his complete first-person PMS Ministerial success story.
Imran Khan declined every such offer. He had no need for them, because his interview preparation was already in principled hands. As Sir Kazim had taught him, an interview does not examine what a candidate knows; it examines who the candidate is. Knowledge had already been tested in the written papers. The panel's real question is one of personality, composure, and bearing. Under Sir Kazim's personal mentorship, he prepared not a script of answers but a posture of confidence: how to approach difficult questions, what attitude to carry into the room, and, above all, how to reverse the psychology of the encounter. A candidate should walk in prepared to demonstrate why the organisation needs him, and justify that claim with substance, rather than sit before the panel as one more job-seeker pleading for selection.
The final result, and his 1st position, only escalated the claim: within days, his photograph was circulating in promotional material for platforms he had never visited. He answered with something few toppers have the courage to do. He issued a public statement, clarifying that he joined no academy for his written preparation, that his success was the result of self-study, consistency, and hard work, and that the only teacher he formally joined was Sir Syed Kazim Ali for English. He respectfully asked all academies and teachers not to use his name or photograph to claim credit for his success and closed with a sentence that should be pinned above every aspirant's desk: give credit where it is genuinely due.
Why CSS Qualifiers Choose Sir Kazim for Essay and Precis
Shagufta Zaman (PAAS – CSS-25) explains why Sir Syed Kazim Ali’s structured methodology, personalized feedback, and examiner-oriented approach to Essay and Precis writing make him the preferred mentor for CSS aspirants.
His Message to Aspirants: Beat the Serious Five Hundred, Not the Statistics
Beyond strategy, Imran Khan carries a piece of perspective, earned from his own passage through the process, that quietly changes how an aspirant experiences the entire journey. The headline numbers of any competitive examination are designed to intimidate: thousands of applicants, a few dozen posts, odds that read like a lottery. But those numbers are an illusion of competition, not a measure of it.
In reality, only a small fraction of any candidate pool, perhaps five to six hundred candidates, enters the hall with serious preparation and genuine guidance. The rest arrive underprepared, misdirected, or dependent on borrowed material that abandons them the moment a topic is twisted. The statistics count bodies; the merit list counts the prepared.
The strategic consequence is liberating. Your task is not to defeat twenty thousand ghosts. It is to be better prepared than the few hundred who are actually competing, a target that is finite, visible, and entirely within reach of disciplined, well-guided effort. Fear shrinks when the real competition comes into focus.
Seven Lessons for Every CSS and PMS Aspirant
Imran Khan's journey condenses into principles that apply far beyond one examination.
- Master English writing first. It is not one paper among many; it is the skill that unlocks every other paper. Content becomes easy to organise once the architecture of expression is in place.
- Sequence skills before content. Months spent building writing, analysis, and structure repay themselves across every paper that follows.
- A mock without evaluation is not preparation. Practise under real-exam conditions and accept mocks only where a genuine specialist corrects your attempt.
- Judge a mentor by correction, not by marketing. The right teacher is the one whose students visibly improve, who diagnoses weaknesses honestly and stays until they are fixed.
- Prepare your personality for the interview, not a script. The panel has already measured your knowledge; the interview measures your bearing. Enter to prove you are needed, not to plead for selection.
- Compete against the serious few, not the statistical many. The real contest involves a few hundred prepared candidates. Aim to out-prepare them, and the odds transform.
- Protect your name. Genuine success never needs to be sold to an academy. Credit belongs only where it is genuinely due, a standard worth upholding before and after the merit list.
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Where Serious Aspirants Can Begin
Imran Khan has himself pointed the way for those who wish to follow his path rather than merely admire it. In his review, he credits CSSPrepForum for its model essays and CSS/PMS guidance, including its dedicated PMS Ministerial Essays collection, and Howtests for its free, downloadable MCQ books with answers and explanations, its solved past papers, and the regular self-mocks through which he tracked his progress. Aspirants preparing for the essay papers specifically should study the evaluated PMS Ministerial Essays on Howtests, written by qualifiers and high scorers and reviewed under Sir Syed Kazim Ali's standards.
And for the skill he placed before everything else, written expression, the training that transformed his weakest ability into his strongest is the English Essay and Precis Course under Sir Syed Kazim Ali, the only teacher whose credit he publicly acknowledged, because it was the only credit genuinely due.
His story ends where an aspirant's should begin, not with an enrolment form, but with a decision to build the skill, trust the discipline, and let the merit list do the advertising.
