More knowledgeable redditors may give better answer.

In general, yes, you will know what you have to do, but you may not know how to do it.

Imperial China had famous examination systems to select the civil servants particularly in Ming and Qing times. Yuan dynasty did not utilize the examination system fully, only held few exams during its course and the graduates constituted only a small part of the civil servants. Kubilai Khan did not held the exam during his reign. It was only reinstituted in the time of Emperor Renzong. Yuan separated her people into 4 ethnic classes which are Mongols, Semu, Han (people from previous Jin), and the Nanren (people form the previous Southern Song). They favored Mongols and Semu over the other 2. It was reflected with the exam separated into Mongols + Semu and Hanren + Nanren. Mongols + Semu exams had arguably easier content and shorter duration compared to the other one. Yuan dynasty started to use Zhu Xi interpretations as the basis of the exams which was followed in Ming. In early Ming, Hongwu instituted the exams, then got disappointed with the quality of the graduates. He stopped the exams for a few years then reinstituted it again later in his reign. In Ming and Qing, most civil service positions were filled by exam graduates. It was harder and harder to pass the exams and the average age of the graduates also rose. Graduating from the exam became a prestigious things that some people would take it again and again until they succeeded. Well, or going embittered and write stories to mock the exams or going crazy and thinking he was Jesus' brother, starting a rebellion, and creating his own exams.

The exams might not be similar to the modern civil service exam. They wanted to find candidates with excellent "moral quality", therefore the content was heavily on Classics interpretation or literature. They also had some practical questions e.g. policies, astronomy, etc. The system favored generalists more than specialists, so they only had 1 type of exams for all civil service positions. The effectiveness of the exam was subject to scrutiny.

Besides the exams, one also could be a civil servant by recommendation or by hereditary privilege, e.g. your father was a high official and you got a post in government.

So if you want to be a civil servant and you did not have any connections, you may take the examinations route and wish your luck to succeed. You have to be graduated from several examinations from local to national levels to earn the Jinshi degree and qualified you for nice starter posts. If you only passed regional exam and earned the Juren degree but not wanting to continue to the national level, you might get a lower starter posts. Once you were graduated, you have to wait to be assigned your job. You may got it immediately after exam or have to wait for some times. Also, your rank in the exam matters. Getting higher rank means you can get better starting post with better future career path than getting a lower rank. In Ming times, you may have to do internship for a year if you are just graduated the exams.

The civil service itself was well developed. However, the system, complexities, and culture were varied from one dynasty to other. But in general they had various posts at the capital (Dadu / Beijing / Nanjing) or other regions. They had ranking system for the civil servants to regulate salary and other benefits. There were 9 ranks, each separated into 2 subranks. A civil service post e.g. a county chief was tied to a rank. However, one could have more than 1 title / held more than 1 post. In this case usually they used the highest rank. In some cases, the title was a "honorary" one and not tied to any actual job.

The job descriptions varied according to the title. There were generalists job e.g. a county chief which was responsible to anything from financial to setting a judicial case in the county. There were also more specialist / technical jobs e.g. oversee the dam / canals. There were also surveillance and review systems, usually done in an interval (e.g. every 3 years in Ming). This would be the basis of demotion / promotion of a civil servant.

If you are a new civil servant you may expect to be assigned a post and have to do the job associated with the post. Sometimes you will have to do tasks that are not really tested in the exams, or you are posted to a region with language you don't understand (China have many languages in her border). In this case you may rely to previous methods of your predecessor, or rely to the functionaries, lower level officials, other workers who are more experienced than you, or the books. You can find many practical manuals in late Imperial China.

Functionaries were differentiated from the civil servants since they usually were not educated rigorously in Classics and they did not pass the exam systems. In contrast to the civil servants who were not posted in their hometown, functionaries were locals. They includes the clerks, runners, constables, etc. Civil servants had trust issues with these people, leading to the stereotype of petty clerks who loved to twist the fact and deceived their superiors.

Day to day activities differed by jobs and era. But if you are an official in the capital, you may have to go to the meetings which are scheduled very early in the day. If you are a civil servant in Yuan dynasty, you may go through many daily meetings since the Yuan loved meetings. There were praise as it discouraged hasty verdicts but also made the pace slower since everything needs a meeting. You may expect day offs during the holidays, especially the New Year. Early dynasty like Western Han had regular day offs every 5 days for each person, but I'm not familiar with Yuan-Qing regular day offs.

Depending on the dynasties you may also have law codes to follow. Ming had the Great Ming Code. Yuan, on the other hand, did not publish a comprehensive law code. Besides the law code, you can also depends on previous edicts and practices. Be careful to not abuse your power and twisting the law as sometimes they send investigating censor to your area to do a surprise review.

Sometimes when the court was cash strapped, they might sold titles for money. If you are rich this may be an easier route for you compared to the exams, but the career path is questionable. If you are a particularly powerful "bandit" and you don't want to start your own kingdom you may bully the court until they give you a nice title and a post.

I had begun a bit of an answer before /u/SettingCool8239 posted theirs, but hit a bit of a snag in that I was having trouble getting good, hard information on the appointment methods used, specifically under the Qing which is my period of speciality. Since then I've managed to dig up some material that goes into more detail – as well as find detail in some works that I'd already known about – and so this answer is largely a small supplement to that focussing solely on the matter of selections for appointment.

In theory, nearly all appointments to official positions were done by lot, except at the very highest levels: when vacancies opened up, one would be assigned to them at random by the Board of Civil Appointments (aka the Ministry of Personnel). So, if you were considered capable enough out of your exams to qualify as an upper-seventh rank, you might find yourself assigned as the magistrate for one of the 1300 counties of China Proper, or in some form of auxiliary role at an imperial academy. If you received a higher or lower rank out of your exams, then the possible posts would again be concomitant to that rank. This, at least, was the theory. In practice, the randomness of the process was somewhat compromised by a few additional complications.

The first was office-selling, which was intermittent throughout the first century and a half of Qing rule in China but became firmly entrenched from the Taiping War (1851-64) onward. We ought to be clear here that office-selling didn't mean that specific postings were sold directly and that you could immediately buy your way into the magistracy of a particular county or a secretarial position at a particular board. Rather, you could purchase a scholarly degree qualifying you for a certain level of posting, and you could in turn buy yourself a higher level of consideration for a specific post – or in other words a place further up the queue – for when your number came up for appointment. This could reach theoretically absurd extremes, such as was the case for Wu Gongliang, who was listed in 1798 as the holder of a gongsheng 貢生 degree and under consideration for a position as a sub-prefectural magistrate for the capital prefecture. Wu Gongliang was three years old, his degree and theoretical candidacy for the magistracy having been purchased by his father Wu Jing, then acting governor of Henan Province, with the expected return on investment to come literally decades down the line. While purchasing candidacy for a specific office did not guarantee your holding it, it nevertheless put your foot in the door with the bureaucracy writ large and significantly heightened your chances of holding a post at or near the rank of the one you had bought a place for. For instance, if you bought a position as a salt intendant, you'd be near-guaranteed a salt intendancy (of which there were only six and all at defined locations), while buying a post as a county magistrate could end up sending you anywhere. Positions up to and including the rank of circuit intendant, therefore, were not necessarily solely obtained by merit as conventionally recognised, but rather a competitive process weighted in favour of those who had bought preferential consideration.

The second was exemptions for high-priority counties. During the Kangxi reign (1661-1722), there had been some recognition that pure sortition might put a sub-par official in charge of a highly sensitive post, and as such governors were allowed to request special dispensation to hand-pick new appointees to specific counties; in addition, counties were rated on a four-letter scale from most to least sensitive. Counties on rivers and the coastline were most likely to be given such consideration, as the threat of piracy and banditry, as well as these counties' position along commercial highways, made their administration especially important. The Kangxi-era measures were, however, rather clunky, and even as Qing rule stabilised, problems with individual counties when it came to administrative workload and political sensitivity never really went away. The priority county system would be introduced under the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1722-35), with an initial, not-entirely-formal designation of riverine and coastal counties as permanently exempted from the appointment lottery, followed by a more comprehensive reform in 1728 proposed by Jin Hong, then the provincial judge for Guangxi and with a temporary appointment as an imperial commissioner for administrative affairs. Per Daniel Koss, Jin Hong's system, which was finally implemented in 1732, saw the four-letter system superseded by a more specific set of tags, where counties could have any number (including, in most cases, none) of the following designations: chong 衝 'thoroughfares', which were located on major land or water routes; fan 繁 'complex', where there were complicated administrative considerations; pi 疲 'tiresome', where taxes were often in arrears; and nan 難 'difficult', 'where the population is wicked, where customs are violent and where cases of theft are numerous'. At the same time, the old river and coastal tags remained in use. Appointments to the magistracies of any county that had at least three problem tags, or a river or coastal one, remained at the discretion of the provincial governor, which again limited the full extent of the lot-based appointment method.

The third was preferential appointment of Bannermen, especially Manchus, principally during the Qianlong reign (1735-96). Ethnic bias was, to be sure, more acute when it came to promotions (which ultimately saw Manchus promoted at a higher rate than Han officials) than appointments, but there were ways in which Manchu preferentialism did affect the direct appointment process. Firstly, the Six Boards had specific ethnic quotas for Han and Banner populations, and with the latter being considerably more numerous than the latter, that meant that competition for such posts was considerably greater among Han aspirants than among Bannermen. Secondly, at the provincial level, a certain level of preferential appointment of Manchus also took place, especially under the Qianlong Emperor, who on average appointed five Manchus to governorships for every four Han; at one stage all eight viceroys (who served either as governors of particularly important provinces, or as supervisors of two or three ordinarily-governed provinces) were Manchus. During the later Kangxi reign and much of the Yongzheng reign, Manchus did not hold county and prefectural appointments at a particularly disproportionate rate – or at least not what could be perceived as one – but some Han officials remarked with increasing perturbation upon what seemed a sudden increase in Manchu appointments to local office from the 1740s onward. So one might also find one's access to official appointment to be influenced heavily by one's ethnic background.

In short, there was theory, and there was practice, and the supposed meritocracy of the Qing was not all that it appeared to be.

Sources and Further Reading

• Elizabeth Kaske, 'Fund-Raising Wars: Office Selling and Interprovincial Finance in Nineteenth-Century China'. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 71:1 (2011)

• Lawrence Zhang, 'Legacy of Success: Office Purchase and State-Elite Relations in Qing China'. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 73:2 (2013)

• Daniel Koss, 'Political Geography of Empire: Chinese Varieties of Local Government'. The Journal of Asian Studies 76:1 (2016)

• R. Kent Guy, Qing Governors and Their Provinces: The Evolution of Territorial Administration in China, 1644–1796 (2010)

First, let’s assume that you have passed the exams and are being considered for a regular civil appointment. So you are not a bannerman, or being appointed under the yin privilege, and you are not buying an office (although you may have bought your degree) or being appointed to someone’s mufu, nor will you be one of those who does not get appointed at all. Nor are you coming in directly as a student from the Ming National University or getting a military appointment. (Other redditors seem to have handled a lot of that.)

The first thing you should do after reading the announcement that you have passed (or failed) the palace exam is to buy a book. Huang Liuhong. A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence (published in 1694) would be a good choice, but there were other guides. You have had a good classical education, and answered all the policy questions on the exam, but you don’t know much about the practical side of government work and having an official career. Huang will walk you through everything.

First, you need to submit your resume. Not everyone who passed the exams wanted to take office right away (or at all). Also, you could try for a job based only on a lower degree, if you did not get your jinshi. This became increasingly difficult as time went by, but lots of people would try anyway.

Huang suggests while waiting for appointment you should live in a monastery or plain lodging house, eat simple food, and avoid the company of women. This will prepare you for the frugal life of a dedicated official in a remote area, and make sure you start in your new post without debt. I assume that one of the reasons he is urging all this frugal behavior is that he knows perfectly well that is not what most new graduates did. Passing the exams meant it was time to party, and the capitol was the place meet people, cement friendships, and use your connections to get a good post, which Huang suggested was both inappropriate and not likely to work. This was not always true.

Xu Jie had a personal interview with the Grand Secretaries before getting his appointment. On the other, hand, he placed 3ed overall in the 1523 palace examination at the age of 18, so he was a bit special. He was appointed a junior compiler of the Hanlin Academy, which was a normal post for people who placed that high. He worked tutoring eunuchs and the future Jiajing emperor. (Dardess pg.4) The Hanlin Academy (the emperor’s chief advisory, academic and cultural organ), was the place to get recognized. Chen Hongmou passed the exams in 1723, and had the nerve to ask for a meeting with the official in charge of the palace exams, Grand Secretary Zhang Tingyu. The two hit it off, and Chen became one of Zhang’s protégés. Chen was also appointed to the Hanlin Academy, and his duties involved sifting through archives in the preparation of the Ming dynastic history, of which Zhang Tingyu was editor-in-chief. Chen’s time at the Hanlin led, in 1726 to an interview with the emperor, who was looking for young talent. The Emperor was impressed..

"This man is outstanding... In the future we can expect great things from him.... He is earnest and fundamentally sound, and has a penetrating understanding of things. It is hard to believe that he is from Guangxi!" Yongzheng cited the fact that Chen had brought his aged parents to live with him in Beijing as testimony to his strong family values and added, "He is said to be good at the horsemanship and archery competitions as well!" (Rowe pg, 50-51)

You are probably not a high-flyer like these two, (you are looking for advice on Reddit!) so you will get a local post. Huang assumes that your first job will be as a district magistrate. This is a pretty safe bet. There were some specialized areas, like the Yellow River bureaucracy, but most officials started out in local government, 13,000 counties and districts in China in the Ming and Qing, and they all needed a magistrate. The magistrate, or father and mother official was the bedrock of the entire system. According to the Draft History of the Qing

A magistrate takes charge of the government of a district. He settles legal cases, metes out punishment, encourages agriculture, extends charity to the poor, wipes out the wicked and the unlawful, promotes livelihood, and fosters education. All such matters as recommending scholars [to the court], reading and elucidating the law and imperial edicts [to the public], caring for the aged, and offering sacrifices to the gods, are his concern. (Ch’u pg. 16)

He was also in charge of things like putting down rebellions, the postal service, granaries, orphanages, etc. So while tax collection, court cases and maintaining order were the things that mattered most in his formal evaluation, he was responsible for pretty much everything.

Appointments to magistracies were made by lot, according to Huang, although if they drew you a post in your home province they would pick another one for you. Once you have your assignment you should spend your last time in the capitol learning about your district. All districts were officially ranked as to how difficult they were, and each had their own tax obligations. You should meet any locals who would want to call on you, talk with officials who have served there, and prepare for office.

One preparation might be getting married, if you were not already. In the Ming you had to be married to hold office. Most importantly, you need to hire some private secretaries. When you arrive at your post you will be confronted with a bunch of local (often corrupt) clerks who you absolutely need to do your job. If you want to be able to keep control of things you need people you hire on your own.

One you have had your audience with the Emperor (a mass audience which he may not even attend, although sometimes he might want to meet with you personally) you have a limited amount of time to get to your post. Your first appearance is a big deal. As Huang puts it.

An old proverb says that a bride's character is judged by her behavior at the time she first steps over the threshold of the family gate, and that the competence of a new magistrate is judged by his action at the time he takes office. Another proverb says that it takes seven days for a magistrate to size up the quality of his subordinates, while it takes only three days the other way round. In observing a person one must see how he handles situations at the beginning; then it will be easy to predict the success or failure of his career. (Huang p.91)

You should fast and stay overnight at the temple of the city god, where a clerk of the rites section reads out the prepared oath and then burns it. You should receive your official seal from the assistant magistrate before taking office. This is a big deal. The seal is your symbol of office, no document is valid without it, and losing it is a serious offense. Rebels always want to seize your seal. On the plus side it can be used to drive away ghosts and demons. If it is damaged you will have to ask for a replacement, which is a big hassle.

The actual ceremony of taking office varies from place to place, but it usually involves a parade to the yamen (magistrate’s office) with musicians and a big crowd. You will make a series of sacrifices, then be presented with all the keys, ledgers etc. by your new subordinates. Congratulations! You are now in charge of everything that happens in this district. If you do well, you may be promoted. If not, well, most officials have short careers anyway.

Sources

Ch’u, T’ung-tsu. Local Government in China under the Ch’ing. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 1962.

Dardess, John W. A Political Life in Ming China: A Grand Secretary and His Times. Illustrated edition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013.

Huang, Liuhong. A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence: A Manual for Local Magistrates in Seventeenth-Century China. Djang Chu trans. Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1984.

Rowe, William T. Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.