The State Department is hiring a record number of new staff. The Foreign Service is recruiting new diplomats at a pace not seen in more than a decade.
But even with these strong hiring rates, which the department hopes to rein in because of recent budget cuts, top leaders say it will take years to reach a healthy staffing level.
The Foreign Service added one of its largest classes of new officers this month, but expects its September class to be about half as large.
The State Department, like the rest of the federal government, may be in the midst of a boom-and-bust budget cycle, especially if lawmakers stick to budget limits agreed to as part of debt ceiling negotiations last year.
But Marcia Bernicat, director general of the Foreign Service and director of the Office of Global Talent Management he told Federal News Network in May that the department plans to continue hiring staff above attrition.
“If you look at our hiring history, just over the last 40 years, it looks like a sine curve,” Bernicat said.
The Foreign Service has a very low attrition rate, and newcomers have a clear career path for the next 20 years. About one-third of new hires will become members of the Senior Foreign Service, allowing them to serve for another 14 years. The Foreign Service has a mandatory retirement age of 65.
“That makes workforce planning easy, right? Except for the fact that we don’t get enough funding on a consistent basis,” Bernicat said. “So when we do get funding, like we did in the last few years, we hire a lot of employees.”
The Foreign Service is currently hiring about 1,000 new employees, its highest level since 2011.
If the State Department continues hiring at this rate, it will take at least until fiscal year 2026 or 2027 to close its current staffing shortfall.
“At our current pace, hiring more than firing, I’m not going to close the staff deficit we have.”
Congress cut the State Department’s overall budget by about 3 percent overall, but those cuts disproportionately affected the Foreign Service Institute, which provides training, the department’s Human Resources office, the Office of Global Talent Management and its salary account.
“That will force us to cut back on hiring a little bit, so we don’t hire more people than we can afford,” Bernicat said. “The goal is to continue hiring above turnover until we can close those gaps.”
The current State Department hiring spree is part of ongoing efforts to reverse the effects of a 16-month hiring freeze that began in 2017 under the Trump administration.
“It doesn’t take much to have a big impact,” Bernicat said of the freeze’s lasting impact.
The Department is considering bringing on more middle-aged experts through its Lateral Entry Pilot Project, but the State Department needs to continue hiring more employees simply to keep up with its consular workload.
“It is, in terms of volume, the largest job we do,” Bernicat said. “It is very important to protect Americans abroad and protect American borders through visa programs. And we need a steady number of people to come and do that work.”
The State Department’s lack of staff to process visas, he added, would have been more noticeable at the start of the Biden administration, had it not been for the COVID-19 pandemic.
“People stopped traveling, which meant that demand for visas and U.S. citizen services dropped sharply, otherwise we wouldn’t have had enough people to meet those critical needs,” he said.
‘We recruit widely’
As part of its recruiting efforts, the State Department is also expanding its talent network, in an effort to shake up its reputation for being “pale, masculine, and from Yale.”
“I hear debates and opinions that say that taking diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility into account in recruiting and hiring practices is weakening national security or the State Department. And I really want your listeners to understand that our greatest strength as a country is our diversity,” Bernicat said.
“How can we not make sure that we leverage that comparative advantage in our foreign affairs workforce, specifically in the people that we are deploying overseas, to understand the world, to interpret it, and to make sure that the world understands what we need?” he added.
Employees hired by the department in the past four years attended more than 500 different universities and hail from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Those recent hires are more likely to come from Colorado or Montana than New York City.
Bernicat added that about 75% of that recent cohort likely attended a military service academy rather than elite universities like Harvard, Princeton or Yale. About 25% of the State Department workforce are veterans, and about 18% of them have a disability.
“We recruit on a large scale. The idea is to cast the net as wide as possible to make sure we get as diverse a pool of recruits as possible, but we only hire on merit,” Bernicat said. “The idea is not to give people exceptions or exclusions. It’s been shown that the wider the net, the more diverse the outcomes will inevitably be.”
Restarting training interrupted by the pandemic
Much of the State Department’s workforce is relatively new to the role and has not had the traditional onboarding experience. About 20 percent of its Foreign Service and 30 percent of its civil service employees were hired since March 2020.
Many of them began working remotely and missed out on basic practical training because of the pandemic. Now, the State Department is taking a closer look at those training gaps and helping its workforce get up to speed in emerging fields like artificial intelligence.
“For about two years, anyone who arrived between March 2020 and the summer of 2022 would not have had a remotely traditional start to their career,” Bernicat said. “They probably worked completely remotely.”
Foreign Service officials entering the country must undertake at least one consular work tour.
“But because no one was traveling, there wasn’t much work to do in terms of issuing visas, or protecting Americans, or more generally managing all the official travel that takes place abroad,” Bernicat said. “These are critical lessons to learn in the early years in the Foreign Service. But all of our workers missed out on a normal start to their careers.”
Over the past two years, the State Department has added 250 training positions for the Foreign Service and about 140 training positions for our civil service employees.
“Secretary Blinken recognized that, as rapidly as the world is changing right now, we need to develop a culture of learning that rewards people for learning and allows them to take time out of their day.
The Foreign Service Institute has also added about two dozen courses that reflect new areas of expertise for diplomatic work. Those courses are intended to support the work of the department’s new offices on global health security and cybersecurity.
“Most people won’t have AI as a primary requirement in their job, but in today’s world everyone needs to have at least a minimal understanding of AI to understand how it can help improve the work they do,” Bernicat said. “So we want everyone to be able to get at least minimal training in AI, and then we want some people to have more complex learning opportunities.”
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