Federal Report

State of the State Department: Hiring above attrition, training a new generation of diplomats

The department’s hires from the past four years studied at more than 500 different colleges and universities, and come from all 50 states.

Jory Heckman@jheckmanWFED

July 22, 2024 5:05 pm

6 min read

The State Department is bringing in a record volume of new hires. The Foreign Service is recruiting new diplomats at a rate not seen in more than a decade.

But even at these robust hiring rates, which the department expects to rein in due to recent budget cuts, top leaders say it’ll take years to get to a healthy level of staffing.

The Foreign Service brought in one of its largest classes of new Foreign Service officers this month, but expects its class in September will be about half as large.

The State Department, like the rest of the federal government, may be on the downturn of a feast-or-famine budget cycle — especially if lawmakers follow through on budget caps agreed to as part of debt ceiling negotiations last year.

But Marcia Bernicat, director general of the Foreign Service and director of the Bureau of Global Talent Management told Federal News Network in May that the department plans to keep hiring above attrition.

“If you look at our hiring history, just over the past 40 years, it looks like a sine curve,” Bernicat said.

The Foreign Service has a very low attrition rate, and entry-level hires have a clear career trajectory for about the next 20 years. About a third of new hires will become members of the Senior Foreign Service, which allows 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 do not get adequate funding consistently,” Bernicat said. “So when we get funding like we had the last couple of years, we hire extensively.”

The Foreign Service is currently hiring about 1,000 new employees — its highest level of hiring since 2011.

If the State Department keeps hiring at these rates, it will take until at least fiscal 2026 or 2027 to close its current staffing deficit.

“At our current rates, hiring above attrition, I won’t close the staffing deficit that we have.

Congress cut the State Department’s overall budget by about 3% overall — but those cuts disproportionately hit the Foreign Service Institute, which provides training, the department’s HR office, the Bureau of Global Talent Management and its salaries account.

“That will require us to slow hiring a bit, so that we don’t hire more people than we can pay,” Bernicat said. “The goal is to continue to hire above attrition until we can close those gaps”

The State Department’s current 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 about the freeze’s lasting impact.

The department is looking at bringing in more mid-career experts through its Lateral Entry Pilot Project. But the State Department needs to keep hiring more employees just to stay on top of its consular workload.

“It is, by volume, the biggest work we do,” Bernicat said. “It’s very important to both protect Americans overseas and protect the American borders through the visa programs. And we need a steady number of people coming in to do that work.”

The State Department’s lack of staff to process visas, she 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. And so that meant the demand for visas and American Citizen Services dropped off precipitously, otherwise we would not have had enough people to meet those very critical needs,” she said.

‘We recruit widely’

As part of its hiring efforts, the State Department is also casting a wider net for talent, in an effort to shake its “pale, male and Yale” reputation.

“I hear debates and opinions that say that taking into account diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in recruitment and hiring practices is weakening national security or weakening the Department of State. And I really want your listeners to understand that our greatest strength as a country is our diversity,” Bernicat said.

“How do we not make sure that we’re taking advantage of that comparative advantage in our foreign affairs workforce, specifically in the people that we’re deploying overseas — to understand the world, interpret the world and make sure the world understands what we need?” she added.

The department’s hires from the past four years studied at more than 500 different colleges and universities, and come from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Those recent hires were more likely to have come from Colorado or Montana than New York City.

About 75% of that recent cohort, Bernicat added, was mostly likely to have attended a military service academy than attend 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 widely. The idea is to spread the net as far as possible to make sure that we’re getting as diverse a set of recruits as possible, but we only hire on merit,” Bernicat said. “The idea is not to give people exceptions or carve-outs. It’s been shown that the wider you cast your net, inevitably, the more diverse your results will be.”

Rebooting training disrupted by pandemic

Large portions of the State Department’s workforce are relatively new on the job and didn’t get the traditional onboarding experience. About 20 percent of the Foreign Service and 30 percent of its civil service employees were hired since March 2020.

Many of them started the job remotely and missed out on core on-the-job training because of the pandemic. Now the State Department is taking a closer look at those training gaps and helping its workforce brush up on emerging fields like AI.

“For about two years, anyone who came in from March of 2020, through the summer of 2022, would not have had anywhere close to a traditional start to their career,” Bernicat said. “They probably worked completely remotely.”

Entry-level Foreign Service officers must do at least one tour of consular work.

“But with no one traveling, there wasn’t much work to be done in terms of issuing visas, or protecting Americans, or, for that matter more broadly, managing all the official travel that comes overseas,” Bernicat said. “These are core lessons to learn in your first couple of years in the Foreign Service. But for all of our workforce, they missed a normal start to their career.”

In the last two years, the State Department has added 250 training float positions for the Foreign Service and added about 140 training float positions for our civil service employees.

“Secretary Blinken recognized, as quickly as the world is changing now, that we need to develop more of a culture for learning that rewards people for learning that gives them time out of their day.

Foreign Service Institute has also added about two dozen courses that reflect new areas of expertise for diplomatic work. Those courses are meant to support the work the department’s newest bureaus on global health security and cybersecurity.

“Most people won’t have artificial intelligence as their central work requirements. But everyone in today’s world needs to be at least minimally conversant in AI, to understand how AI could help enhance the work they do,” Bernicat said. “So, we want everyone to be able to get at least minimal training in AI, we then would want some people to get more complex learning opportunities.”