Vivian Derryck, Deputy Assistant Secretary-designate, Equal Employment
Opportunity
Attachment
Paper Prepared in the Foreign Service
Institute3
Washington, undated
CAREER DEVELOPMENT AND TRAINING FOR FOREIGN
SERVICE AND DEPARTMENT PERSONNEL
The Need
Critics of the Department of State over many years have consistently
faulted us for failure to develop systematically our personnel.
Recognizing that our people are our main resource in carrying out
United States diplomacy, we have no excuse—especially in times of
budget stringency—for not bringing these people to fuller
effectiveness by careful development of careers through assignments
and training. Most recently the Senate has addressed this need in an
amendment to the proposed Foreign Service Act which mandates a full
career development and training plan and requires us to report in 90
days from passage on progress and the resources needed.
The unique combination of foreign affairs generalist and expert in
some of the many special functions and areas that are vital to
foreign
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affairs
(economics, science and technology, military/disarmament affairs,
narcotics, to name a few) defines a very difficult and changing
career development task. Yet a personnel force that has substantive
depth in these specialties, as well as the generalist’s foreign
policy sense, is crucial to the Secretary of State’s remaining
effective in all the specialized fields that are critical to
management of foreign policy. Given the breadth and depth of these
requirements, increased training, together with more tailored
assignment experiences, has to be a part of a successful
approach.
Adequate investment in training our people has not been possible
previously because we have too few people in the system to fill all
line jobs, much less provide training, creating continual pressure
on even our existing training programs. Therefore, to implement a
structured approach of training for all Foreign Service officers at
strategic points in their careers, as foreseen in the Pell Amendment in the new Act, we
need, as a minimum, additional people in the Service at least
equivalent to the resulting increase in person/years of training.
Otherwise we could meet the important career development and
training requirement only by neglecting or further understaffing
other important functions—an unsustainable approach. The cost of the
plan is largely this personnel cost—expanding employment by the
amount of additional time in training.
The Proposal
Based on the nature and variety of jobs Foreign Service officers are
expected to do throughout their careers, we have developed a
strategic approach to enhancing their effectiveness by professional
training for all at 3 critical points of their careers—the
beginning, early mid-level and the senior threshold. The expansion
of initial training is concentrated on basic job skills plus
grounding in the requirements and tools of analytical reporting. (We
are also requesting additional junior officer positions overseas to
assure that more of them get both more varied and more reporting
experience early in their careers.) Mid-level training—an entirely
new program—is designed to deepen professional skills in an
officer’s main function (political, economic, administrative,
consular) as well as broaden our skills base by training in a
second, probably less traditional area of foreign affairs. The main
function of senior-level training would be program management,
defined broadly to include the domestic and bureaucratic dimensions
of successful foreign affairs management, although some of this
would be covered at mid-level as well.
We also propose to correct the shocking inadequacy of language
training and area orientation for Foreign Service staff people, most
of whom are now sent to work and live overseas without any such
train
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ing. Under the
proposal we could provide basic language training and relevant area
orientation for about two-thirds of our staff going overseas, rising
eventually to a skill base where virtually all would have this
preparation.
While expansion of the junior officer training (by 3 weeks) and the
senior management training (5 weeks) can be absorbed, the new
mid-level program (5 months for 180 FSO-5s each year) and the expanded training for Foreign
Service staff (about 140 annually in 10 week language/area courses,
plus increased administrative, consular and communications training)
are not possible without increasing the work force by the planned
increase in training investment each year: 75 FSO (for 75 person/years of additional
training) and 45 Foreign Service Staff positions.
To provide continuity and to assure Congress, OMB and ourselves that we mean
business, we would take these additional positions, plus what
training investment we now make, and segregate them in a “training
complement” that defines the annual investment the Foreign Service
should make to operate the career development and training program
at the level required. In other words we are not just asking for
some more training positions, we are proposing to establish a
permanent career development and training program which consists of
a defined annual investment in personnel time, the addition of
people needed to assure permanence, segregated in a training
complement, and a completely revised curriculum of the Foreign
Service Institute to meet the needs of this program.
The proposed increase in training for the Department’s Civil Service
employees emphasizes management training and job-related functional
training. Because of the nature of the Civil Service system, new
training positions are not required, other than establishment of a
Presidential Management Intern complement.
Curriculum of Foreign Service Institute
Secretary Vance, concerned
about missed opportunities in the role of the Foreign Service
Institute, had ordered a complete review and reform of its
curriculum.4 This
task is already underway, although part of it will meet the
instructional side of the career development and training proposal
and therefore accounts for part of the proposal’s cost. This review
concluded that while the quality of FSI’s courses should be improved, the main reason it
was not achieving the desired, strategic increase in the
effectiveness of our people was the problem of delivering the
training under current personnel constraints. The career develop
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ment and training proposal,
entailing increased personnel, the training complement and the three
levels of required professional training for all FSOs, was the major result of the
review’s conclusions, but FSI has
undertaken other course reforms to meet the delivery problem as
well.
Since most of our FSOs now go
overseas with no training in the area they are supposed to interpret
and analyze, we face a serious risk to the stable of in-depth area
knowledge and communications effectiveness that is one of the
traditional strengths of the Foreign Service. To address this
problem FSI has created a more
challenging and country-specific set of area courses which are now
integrated with the basic language training that all of our officers
take several times during their careers.
To allow more Foreign Service staff and family members to get basic
language and relevant area orientation (aimed at living in a society
rather than analyzing it), FSI is
also developing a new set of short language courses, again
integrated with area orientation, for all the world’s major
languages. This will allow many more staff members and working
spouses to make the shorter investment in time required for a
facility in the language and culture adequate for social and
logistical requirements. These courses will be introduced in
January.
An expanded junior officer course and an analytical reporting course
(oddly enough the first of its kind) are now in operation.
Development of the 5-month mid-level program, which we hope to offer
to the first group of 60 FSO-5s
next July (if OMB approves our
proposal and the Congress has not rejected it) has begun but will
not be completed until early next year. In the functional part of
this program (economics for economic officers, political analysis
for political officers, etc.) our objectives will be to deepen our
officers’ capacity for analysis, particularly of overseas events and
to enhance their understanding of the full context of major foreign
policy issues, including the United States domestic dimension. The
basic vehicles will be issues and case studies with concepts, theory
and topical background used to probe the meaning and trends
underlying the current state of critical issues. The approach will
be to analyze issues such as energy, disarmament negotiations and
immigration in such depth that both broader specific understanding
and the habits of rigorous thinking are imparted. A second element
of the program would entail each officer’s going outside his or her
primary field to learn about other aspects of foreign affairs, which
could be economic analysis for a consular officer or narcotics,
nuclear, or administrative matters for a political officer. This is
designed to fit the new emphasis on “out-of-cone” assignments to
prepare better generalists and to serve the Department’s need for
more substantive depth in non-traditional functions. The third
segment of the program, the only one to be a common experience for
all officers, would provide
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training in mid-level management as well as the specific
requirements for bureaucratic effectiveness in a complex Washington
environment.
