Renee Earle, in Joining the Foreign Service: Then, Now and In-between, has a phenomenal quote that may interest officers and prospective officers alike:
Ed Williams, FSO-retired, recalls taking the written exam in 1953, after a year of graduate school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a Fulbright Scholarship in New Zealand. The exam lasted three and a half days, and was followed by another half day of language exams. Today, the written exam is three hours long. The general exam, says Williams, covered everything from astronomy to zoology! Today’s general knowledge section of the test (Job Knowledge) covers information that is relevant to the five Foreign Service Officer career tracks listed above - and probably won’t ask you to chart the planets…
The oral exam, by contrast, was shorter in 1953 than it is today. It consisted principally of an hour-long interview in front of six senior officers, which covered Williams’ thesis on New Zealand, the U.S. constitution, and other aspects of U.S. political history. The Oral Assessment has not changed much in more recent years, as it was judged a best practice in identifying the best suited Foreign Service Officers. But, in 1984, this author recalls the feeling of a deer in the headlights when a panel of three senior FSO testers asked her to speak for six minutes about Japanese-American relations since World War II!
An interesting read, no?
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It occurs to me as I read this that the system they are using to accept people to the program may not be the wisest. Why test people more or less exclusively on how they respond to questions they are too often likely to know very little about? Is the work of the Foreign Service mainly about constantly responding to things an FSO knows very little about? I mean, one would expect that to occur periodically, but is it the routine daily experience? It would seem that if one wants to know what a candidate is made out of (besides the ability to tap-dance around difficult questions, to fudge, to cram for exams, or just to get lucky sometimes) you would want them to speak extemporaneously on a topic that they actually DO know something about, and see how well they can handle a subject upon which they themselves claim some expertise. Wouldn’t that better match what FSO’s do on the job on a daily basis? It seems that superb candidates could be rejected simply by having the bad luck of being asked, from the apparently limited number questions which are asked during the process, about subjects where they know little, with the examiners never getting to examine them on their strengths. Is there any straightforward interview process involved here where the decision-makers can actually find out what the candidate has going for them via an open-ended, as opposed to a narrowly constrained, topic?
One thing these pages for prospective FSO’s do not mention at all is TRAINING. In most other professional fields I have ever heard (except things like medical or aviation fields) of no one expects a new hire to know much of anything; rather, what is expected is that they be TRAINABLE. This includes engineering, law, the military, most areas of business, police work, and scores of other occupations too numerous to mention. How does this work in the State Department?