directed assignments and prime candidates
Just in case you've been following the news and/or wondering, I have not been notified that I'm a Prime Candidate.
For those who haven't been following the news (and who would? it's not like there's a war on or anything.... ), the State Dept. didn't get enough qualified volunteers to fill some 48 generalist positions (out of 252) at at our embassy in Baghdad or on one of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) this year.
What should have been news is that every hiring cycle up to now they were able to fill the jobs with volunteers, but you won't see any headlines about that.
Some background numbers. In the entire U.S. Foreign Service, there are only 11,500 officers and specialists. A little more than half, some 6,500 of those are officers, also known as "generalists." The remainder are some 5,000 FS specialists (everything from officer managers, nurses, physicians, information management, and diplomatic security agents to facility managers).
Since the Baghdad embassy opened, over 2,000 generalist officers have volunteered and served (or are still serving) in Iraq. That's about a third of the generalists corps.
At any given time, about 68 percent of the Foreign Service is serving abroad, at one of 267 embassies, consulates or other missions (That's cool; I'd expect similar numbers of Forest Service people to be serving in, er, forests as well). That percentage stays pretty constant over time.
The American Foreign Service Association recently published an interesting essay about all that, contrasting it usefully with the military services.
Contrasting the military and diplomatic deployments can be very confusing. It's not as if the State Dept. has bases in the U.S. where entire embassy and consulate staffs sit training and preparing to deploy at a moment's (or a year's) notice. Two-thirds of the FSO corps is already deployed at any given time.
Most assignments are two or three years in duration. Over 60 percent of them are at posts rated as being hardship assignments. Half of those are rated as extreme hardship. There are about 700 jobs that are single-year assignments, due to the dangerous nature or very extreme hardship involved. In addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, those assignments are about the ones you'd expect (e.g., Liberia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, &tc.).
Those 700 one-year unaccompanied (too dangerous to bring your family) assignments have to be filled each and every year.
Officer assignments at the entry-level are "directed." There's a list of open positions and junior officers submit a ranked list of the jobs they'd like, but the decisions are made by a committee comprising those officers career development officers (CDO). Those are generally vice consul or third secretary positions, roughly the company-grade officers, the lieutenants and captains of the Foreign Service (FS-06 thru FS-04) (Note: a quirk of the FS scale is that the higher the rank or "class," the lower the FS number).
Once you get to the mid-grade ranks, you get to have a lot more input into where you'd like to go next. Those are grades FS-03 thru FS-01, the consuls and second/first secretaries (don't ask me to delineate who gets second vs. first secretary as their diplomatic titles), corresponding with military field-grade officers in ranks major through colonel.
The bidding process is electronic, you review the universe of positions coming open at the appropriate time (taking into account factors like when you're eligible for transfer, required training such as language instruction, and home/annual leave dates) and provide a list of a half-dozen "core" bids.
No more than two (three?) can be within the same geographical region (Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, Near East Asia, South and Central Asia, and Western Hemisphere).
You can add additional, non-"core" bids up to a total of 15 prospective positions.
There's an addition dimension of "lobbying" that comes into play for assignments at this level. The various regional/geographical bureaus pretty much decide who gets the jobs in their region's missions. The exceptions to that are consular jobs, which are controlled by the Consular Affairs bureau irrespective of where they are in the world. I'm not going to go much into what "lobbying" involves, mainly because I suck at it and don't want anyone to follow my bad advice/example.
Last year they made a change to the bidding process which meant that the hard-to-fill jobs would be filled first, before anybody got a wink, nod, hug, kiss or handshake (actually, only "handshakes" or "hugs" are actually terms used for being officially penciled-in for a job before actually getting written notice) for any other job.
In other words, you didn't get to sit in a chair until the music stopped. And the music wouldn't stop until somebody was seated in every hard-to-fill seat. That meant that every one of the 700 unaccompanied tour positions, plus all the positions at posts with higher (15%+) hardship differentials, had to be filled during "pre-season" before all the London, Paris, and Rome positions (not to mention all the other nicer or at least less-icky places) could be filled during regular bidding season.
That apparently worked quite well. Once. I'm a fan of it because I was offered a position at a higher hardship differential post (one of my "core" bids, BTW) during pre-season, which I accepted. So I knew early where I was going next.
This year that system is coming up 48 qualified bidders shy of the 252 needed for Baghdad and the Iraq PRTs.
(UPDATE: With 15 more suitably qualified FSOs having volunteered as of Friday, Nov. 2, only 33 jobs will need to be filled by directed assignment.)
Those are all jobs in the FS-03 to OC ranks or "classes" (equiv. to major thru brigadier general). So what is in effect a "pre-pre-season" just for those jobs has been instituted. A couple of hundred generalists at the appropriate grades and possessing the requisite/relevant experience have already been identified as "prime candidates." Word of mouth is that these are primarily political or economic "cone" officers (or perhaps officers with political/economic experience). They have to have the correct medical clearance, and can submit a short statement of their circumstances (from the guidance this seems to amount to "explain why you shouldn't be picked" statement), but this is going to let the assignments people be able to pick the best of several candidates for each position.
For those who haven't been following the news (and who would? it's not like there's a war on or anything.... ), the State Dept. didn't get enough qualified volunteers to fill some 48 generalist positions (out of 252) at at our embassy in Baghdad or on one of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) this year.
What should have been news is that every hiring cycle up to now they were able to fill the jobs with volunteers, but you won't see any headlines about that.
Some background numbers. In the entire U.S. Foreign Service, there are only 11,500 officers and specialists. A little more than half, some 6,500 of those are officers, also known as "generalists." The remainder are some 5,000 FS specialists (everything from officer managers, nurses, physicians, information management, and diplomatic security agents to facility managers).
Since the Baghdad embassy opened, over 2,000 generalist officers have volunteered and served (or are still serving) in Iraq. That's about a third of the generalists corps.
At any given time, about 68 percent of the Foreign Service is serving abroad, at one of 267 embassies, consulates or other missions (That's cool; I'd expect similar numbers of Forest Service people to be serving in, er, forests as well). That percentage stays pretty constant over time.
The American Foreign Service Association recently published an interesting essay about all that, contrasting it usefully with the military services.
Contrasting the military and diplomatic deployments can be very confusing. It's not as if the State Dept. has bases in the U.S. where entire embassy and consulate staffs sit training and preparing to deploy at a moment's (or a year's) notice. Two-thirds of the FSO corps is already deployed at any given time.
Most assignments are two or three years in duration. Over 60 percent of them are at posts rated as being hardship assignments. Half of those are rated as extreme hardship. There are about 700 jobs that are single-year assignments, due to the dangerous nature or very extreme hardship involved. In addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, those assignments are about the ones you'd expect (e.g., Liberia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, &tc.).
Those 700 one-year unaccompanied (too dangerous to bring your family) assignments have to be filled each and every year.
Officer assignments at the entry-level are "directed." There's a list of open positions and junior officers submit a ranked list of the jobs they'd like, but the decisions are made by a committee comprising those officers career development officers (CDO). Those are generally vice consul or third secretary positions, roughly the company-grade officers, the lieutenants and captains of the Foreign Service (FS-06 thru FS-04) (Note: a quirk of the FS scale is that the higher the rank or "class," the lower the FS number).
Once you get to the mid-grade ranks, you get to have a lot more input into where you'd like to go next. Those are grades FS-03 thru FS-01, the consuls and second/first secretaries (don't ask me to delineate who gets second vs. first secretary as their diplomatic titles), corresponding with military field-grade officers in ranks major through colonel.
The bidding process is electronic, you review the universe of positions coming open at the appropriate time (taking into account factors like when you're eligible for transfer, required training such as language instruction, and home/annual leave dates) and provide a list of a half-dozen "core" bids.
No more than two (three?) can be within the same geographical region (Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, Near East Asia, South and Central Asia, and Western Hemisphere).
You can add additional, non-"core" bids up to a total of 15 prospective positions.
There's an addition dimension of "lobbying" that comes into play for assignments at this level. The various regional/geographical bureaus pretty much decide who gets the jobs in their region's missions. The exceptions to that are consular jobs, which are controlled by the Consular Affairs bureau irrespective of where they are in the world. I'm not going to go much into what "lobbying" involves, mainly because I suck at it and don't want anyone to follow my bad advice/example.
Last year they made a change to the bidding process which meant that the hard-to-fill jobs would be filled first, before anybody got a wink, nod, hug, kiss or handshake (actually, only "handshakes" or "hugs" are actually terms used for being officially penciled-in for a job before actually getting written notice) for any other job.
In other words, you didn't get to sit in a chair until the music stopped. And the music wouldn't stop until somebody was seated in every hard-to-fill seat. That meant that every one of the 700 unaccompanied tour positions, plus all the positions at posts with higher (15%+) hardship differentials, had to be filled during "pre-season" before all the London, Paris, and Rome positions (not to mention all the other nicer or at least less-icky places) could be filled during regular bidding season.
That apparently worked quite well. Once. I'm a fan of it because I was offered a position at a higher hardship differential post (one of my "core" bids, BTW) during pre-season, which I accepted. So I knew early where I was going next.
This year that system is coming up 48 qualified bidders shy of the 252 needed for Baghdad and the Iraq PRTs.
(UPDATE: With 15 more suitably qualified FSOs having volunteered as of Friday, Nov. 2, only 33 jobs will need to be filled by directed assignment.)
Those are all jobs in the FS-03 to OC ranks or "classes" (equiv. to major thru brigadier general). So what is in effect a "pre-pre-season" just for those jobs has been instituted. A couple of hundred generalists at the appropriate grades and possessing the requisite/relevant experience have already been identified as "prime candidates." Word of mouth is that these are primarily political or economic "cone" officers (or perhaps officers with political/economic experience). They have to have the correct medical clearance, and can submit a short statement of their circumstances (from the guidance this seems to amount to "explain why you shouldn't be picked" statement), but this is going to let the assignments people be able to pick the best of several candidates for each position.
posted by Consul-At-Arms at 7:33 AM
3 Comments:
I'm very glad that the open slots in Iraq are filling fast with bona fide volunteers. They are great Americans each and every one.
I just wish a few FSOs had not decided to go on national news and pubicly rebel against going to Iraq. Those few individuals have done a great disservice to the reputation of the other FSOs out there who do their jobs professionally and without complaint.
They make me as mad as the retired generals lately that have decided to speak out against the administration.
Talk about pushing my "hot" button.
I'm glad that there are FSOs like you out there (and I'm sure the vast majority are just like yourself) doing the tough jobs.
Take care.
Marcus
"I just wish a few FSOs had not decided to go on national news and pubicly rebel against going to Iraq."
Keep the actual context and setting of the remarks in mind: an employee "Town Hall" meeting where a signal change in personnel assignments policy was being announced.
Not a press conference.
Not an anti-war protest march.
Not any kind of politicized setting.
It was precisely the sort of venue where disagreements and complaints should be aired. Unfortunately the media has seized the opportunity to make more of this than it is.
I definitely understand how the media ran with this one, but the debate that really set me off was one a few days after the story broke. I was watching the "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" and they had representatives for FSOs on both sides of the argument debating the issue.
This was not ambush journalism sensationalizing the issue, it was an arranged debate on national television.
When the story first broke I was only mildly annoyed. When I saw "The News Hour," I was apoplectic.
Anyway, I'm glad there are plenty of volunteers stepping up. Those are the folks we want in Iraq anyway.
Marcus
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