The closest counterpart to the Chinese imperial examination system in the West is Her Majesty's Civil Service. But that's hardly surprising, considering that the civil service was inspired by the imperial examinations in the Far East. The British colonial administrators in China observed the system, and urged its adoption back home. In the words of Robert Inglis, a British visitor to China in 1835: "The British East India Company... have adopted the principle as far as election to the civil service...The full development in India of this Chinese invention is destined one day, perhaps, like those of gunpowder and printing, to work another great change in the state-systems of Europe".

Like Inglis predicted, its first implementation in the British Empire was in colonial India. The officials were educated men ideally with a mastery of "knowledge to which it is desirable that English Gentleman should pay attention" and "who have taken the first degree in arts at Oxford or Cambridge" (source: Macauley Report of 1854), a description that recalls the scholar-officials of imperial China. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 brought the system to the British Isles.

Source: The Higher Civil Service in the United States by Huddleston and Boyer from the Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies. It's technically a history of the American civil service system, but it does cover the early history of civil service examinations.