The basic hoops for a foreign service candidacy

Have you recently asked yourself this question: “Wonder when Missy is going to get into the foreign service and leave the country with my precious grandchildren”?  Well, here is a very long and drawn out answer.

A quick (ha ha) recap of the foreign service hiring process:

Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) –> Qualified Evaluation Panel (QEP) –> Oral Assessment (OA) –> Security/Medical Clearances –> Final Evaluation –> Register –> Language Testing (Optional) –> A-100 Training Class –> Language Training (optional) –> Job.

This is a brief outlay of the hoops that must be jumped in order to become a foreign service officer, and disqualification at any point means GIVE UP or START OVER or DO NOT COLLECT $100, however you decide to look at it.

Here is my personal timeline (some dates are estimated):

FSOT (08/15/2009) –> QEP (09/05/2009) –> OA (01/27/2010) –> Med Clearance (03/15/2010) –> Security Clearance (03/17/2010) –> Final Evaluation (09/15/2010) –> Register (09/22/2010) –> Language Testing (10/15/2010)

Okay, so all I have left to do is get into training, right?  Well, it’s more complicated than that (of course!).  As you can see, I have already jumped most hoops, but there are a couple of provisos…

Every person who passes the oral assessment, which is a day long series of tests, demos and interviews, is ranked. When that person gets to the register, they are added 1) By order of rank, and 2) By date placed on register. So, say I am Josephine Q. Public, and I pass the OA (yay!) and there is exultation, beer and singing in the streets. Each section of the OA is ranked, and then those numbers are totalled at the end. There is a cut-off score, which, when I took it, was 5.25. A 7.0 is the highest score humanly possible, so someone who scores between 5.25 and 7.0 goes on to the next hoops, after which that person is placed on the register BEHIND everyone currently there with the same score. So, if Miss Public gets a 7.0 score, and there are 15 people with a 7.0 score ahead of her, she is #16 on the register.

Got it?

Okay. Moving on.

The truth is, scores above a 5.7 are pretty rare, and the current highest score on the ‘shadow’ register (an accumulation of scores voluntarily given in a Yahoo group) is 6.125 for my ‘cone’ or area of specialty, which is management. My friend Aaron scored crazy high, but he’s an overachiever like that. I (naturally) expected to fail, but instead I passed ‘giri-giri’, or, in English, by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin: I passed with a 5.3 (they don’t actually give 5.25s, so far as I can tell, so 5.3 is the lowest passing score).

So, if that was my score set in stone, I would currently be 93/112 on the register, which would be a nice ego-booster (look! I passed! But I’m never going to make it to training!) but I had an ace up my sleeve: Japanese. Here is one of those provisos I mentioned: knowing a foreign language gets me (brownie) points, which get added to my score, leap-frogging me above all those other saps who don’t speak but one language (‘Merican, of course). For Japanese (it varies) I needed at least a level 2 in speaking, meaning I could survive in a business environment without mixing the word for ‘toilet’ with ‘business letter’ (at least while sober). I hadn’t been in-country for 10 years (now 11) so I did some brushing up, and I felt like a big fool during the test (mixing up the word for ‘gulf’ with the word for ‘gang’, making a question about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill very ambiguous) but somehow, miraculously, I passed. Knowing Japanese gave me .17 to add to my score, so:

5.3 + .17 = 5.47

Okay, so Aaron still gets kudos for an extremely high passing score AND knowledge of Japanese (although back then Japanese counted for .4) but this was enough to leapfrog me over 60 people or so, putting me at 36/94 at the time (I think; now I’m 33/112). Great, right? I’ve jumped all the hoops, I’m in the upper third of all eligible hires, now to get into the next training class…except…

Oh. Government budget cuts. Right.

So, hiring slowed from 10-15 people per training class (roughly 4-6 training classes per year) to 5-7 people per training class. Oh, and remember, all those Aarons out there, who know a language AND get a really high OA score? They all go IN FRONT of me. See, it’s ranked by number first, then by date, so if I have a 6.5 and my friend has a 6.6, she goes ahead of me, even if I’ve been waiting on the register for a year.

So it’s just a waiting game, right? I mean, eventually I’ll be the head 5.47 person, and they’ll call me…right?

Of course not!  Around 20,000 people apply for the foreign service EVERY YEAR, and about 1000 people get to the level where I am currently, with around 400-600 who actually get hired, so there is continual new competition. It’s in the state department’s best interest to select the very best and brightest, and that selection continues, even on the register, as those who know languages jump ahead of those who don’t (languages are an extremely valued skill for a department that serves worldwide, obviously). So, there is a limit to how long you get to stay on the register, and that limit is 18 months. If a candidate isn’t called by the end of 18 months, s/he ‘expires’ from the register and starts again from scratch.

This means that being #33 isn’t that great of a deal, because yeah, I *might* get in, but let’s say every month 2 people who scored higher than me are added to the register (a very low estimate) and they take 5 people for a training class; that means that, in a year, if there were four training classes, I would go backwards and be #37, and if there are six classes, I would only go forward by three to #29. Well, I only get a year and a half, so that makes my chances pretty crappy, even including variables such as others who expire off the register ahead of me. So what to do?

Currently, if I don’t choose the GIVE UP option, I can do two things: increase my score, or start my candidacy anew. The thing is, Japanese is considered a hard language but not a critical one; critical languages are ones the State Department is desperate for their people to know, so they give a bigger bonus: .4 instead of .17. Even better, SUPER critical languages like Chinese and Arabic give a bonus of .5.

5.3 + .5 (.4)= 5.8 5.7 (you can only count ONE language bonus, they don’t stack)(Note: .5 is only for Arabic. I can get .4 for Mandarin)

Currently, a 5.8 5.7 would put me at #15 or so on the register — meaning I would probably get called to training pretty quickly. The other option is to start over from scratch…kinda. I can do what is called a ‘second candidacy’ by starting over with the foreign service officer test, but because I’ve already got my clearances and language bonus, I only have to jump these hoops:

Foreign Service Language Test (FSOT) –> Qualified Evaluation Panel (QEP) –> Oral Assessment (OA) –> Register –> A-100 Training Class –> Language Training (optional) –> job

Now, it’s possible to NOT pass part or all of these the second time — the Yahoo! board was recently filled with comments from people who either didn’t pass some part of the testing, or passed with an identical or lower score. There is no penalty for passing with a lower score, so no disincentives here to trying, but there is a time investment and, for those like me who have to fly to take the OA, a significant money investment.

So, I decided to hedge my bets, and I am currently a) taking Chinese, and b) retaking the FSOT on February 10th. I decided to go whole hog* on my second candidacy — what have I got to lose? — so I applied for public diplomacy as my specialty rather than management. It’s hard to know what specialty to choose; the job is technically a ‘generalist’ position, but there is some specialization that happens mid-career. I don’t have much management experience outside of my master’s-level courses, but Aaron claims that ‘shy’ people like me are better in management. Public diplomacy sounds pretty cool to me, but it sounds cool to lots other people, too, so there is stiffer competition in that specialty. Hard to say what I’d be better at, but since I’m covering my bases, I figured I would broaden my possibilities and apply to another specialty.

As for Chinese…it’s hard to say whether or not I can get to a speaking level of 2 by March 2012. I doubt I’ll be able to spend time in-country, and I’ve never become proficient at a language via a classroom, being more of a hands-on kind of girl. Marti claims I’m ‘good’ at languages, but that’s because I used to wake up speaking to him in Japanese, back when I’d practically forgotten English. He never really saw the struggle I went through to get to that point (it took me a month to learn my first word, tsuki, or moon — something my Japanese teacher liked to remind me of frequently) but it’s hard to say how I will do now that I have some language under my belt. I’m spending 2-4 hours a day studying plus class, but early language learning is so hard…like lifting a mountain, pebble by pebble.

‘The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.’ ~Confucius

So that’s it, folks — a ‘quick’ recap of the hiring process. I guess I could have just said “still waiting” but that isn’t as much fun, now, is it? Plus, writing this out is allowing me to procrastinate on my programming, a nice side bonus.

*Idahoism translation: whole hog = all out, do my best