Literacy has an impact on promotions and Clerks promoting from Craftsmen have impact on efficiency.
What I did with Ottos:
1. NF on Crats, aiming at 100% admin efficiency. Attacked Egypt from all sides (DONT disband your fleet, rather add a couple Clippers, just disable trade for artillery and clippers when you aren't building them to cut spending), wiped their army out and took like 5 regions from them. Sphered Persia (who attacked Egypt soon after with Free People to give me another region for free (lol)). Then started working on other easy countries around me and in Asia.
2. NF on Clergy, aiming at 4% but failing at that due to a large amount of states, and a huge amount of Egyptian POPs coming in ruining my %. 100% edu spending, like 91% crat spending, huge taxes all over.
3. Researched "Brazilian" way, Ideological Thought, Idealism, Empricism, Medicine and education efficiency techs up to Biologism. Then researched to get Suez (Inorganic Chemistry, Machine Tools, Iron Steamers). Built a solid navy with spare cash, just because I feel Ottos ought to, my British allies were dominating the seas either way.
4. Built an army of 100% infantry as that's the cheapest option for short wars and I knew I will only have RPs for Machine Guns in the first half of the game, stayed friendly with Russians (200 relations, they left me alone for some reason, busy in China I guess, but I'd totally beaten them up with all the extra POPs I conquered), finished Egypt off and then subjugated the Arabian Peninsula too (got lucky with CB creation, so why not).
5. Researched for colonization (Machine Guns, Medicine, Nationalism/Imperialism) and started a massive push into Africa with all my NFs and a loooot of troops. Conquered Ethiopia, Tunisia, Algeria, Sokoto, Transvaal (got conquest CB from them with a FUN event making me desire their diamonds). And well, colonized everything between.
6. When done with colonization prep and at good LIT finally, researched for industry efficiency (starting with +output techs, but also input/throughput and general RGO efficiency too) and switched NFs to capitalist when they were finally available for this task. Sphered a lot of countries in Asia (Siam, Dain Nam, Guangxi, Japan, Yunnan) by that time for resources.
7. Invested in the initial bunch of factories, then switched the NF to Clerks (#1 game) or Craftsmen (#2 game). Switched the party to liberals (Young Turks), cut rich and middle tax to 0% and let it roll for the rest of the game while I was having fun sinking Frenchie ships in the great wars for nothing.
I had better tech much faster with Clerks NFs, but landed with a much higher IND pumping Craftsmen, both let me finish 1st mostly via prestige from colonies though, so there isn't much difference between the two approaches. My early factories weren't empty and I had some basic good score even before working on efficiency, but all that was driven by subsidies.