Apply everywhere you'd be willing to work. Take the civil service test, apply to the state police, NJ transit and port authority. If you want to up your chances.. move to a large civil service town or city.

lol so basically no full time cops are allowed to apply

Trenton is likely your best bet if you want to go the inner city route. Ewing is also a good option, they have exhausted the township list in the past and I think they've hired county wide a couple times

Trenton, Ewing, Lawrence, Hamilton are civil service. Trenton goes to a county list sometimes but it's not a guarantee. Hamilton is SUPER competitive for whatever reason and it's difficult to be hired there without vet status.

I think Carteret and Perth Amboy are both civil service as well

Moving to New Brunswick or North Brunswick are good options in middlesex. Both are decent sized civil service departments

theres also alternate route (applying to the academy directly and paying for the tuition yourself). Which makes u qualified for job postings that require an academy certification. It also makes u a more attractive candidate

Take the civil service test, state police test, NJ transit PD test. For civil service if you're approaching 35 years old and need the job soon, then I'd recommend moving to a large city like Newark/Patterson. Or at least somewhere in Essex county that is a civil service municipality so you also have...

I don't see a reason why the prosecutors office would make things "harder". The curriculum is still from the PTC. As far as how hard PT is and how strict everything will be, I think that depends on the individual instructors. Don't worry about how "hard" the academy is anyway.... it's meant to prepa...

From what I've known, the county academies are run by the county agencies. Mine was run by the sheriffs dept and prosecutors office. With APs teaching the a bulk of the legal courses. We had three main instructors that were there everyday, two were sheriffs one was from the prosecutors office.