How Long Are You In The Foreign Service

Where We Stand

By JULIE NUTTER

The start of the new year's day seems like the perfect time to update our members with recent facts and figures on the U.South. Strange Service.

The data comes in handy for AFSA's Speakers Agency members who volunteer to tell the story of the Foreign Service. But it's besides useful for active-duty members, whether they are writing testimony for a main or submitting an article to The Foreign Service Journal.

Personnel Numbers. Let'southward start with the Foreign Service itself. The Foreign Service is in 276 posts away, and FS members spend, on boilerplate, two-thirds of their careers overseas. The latest personnel numbers show that the Strange Service every bit a whole, counting all agencies, stands at approximately 15,600 members.

Land is the largest group at the stop of Fiscal Twelvemonth 2019, with 13,790 Foreign Service members: 7,999 generalists and five,791 specialists (consular fellows are counted by State Human Resources equally specialists).
USAID has nearly one,700 FSOs, with plans to hire 150 more.
The Foreign Commercial Service has 229 members at more than 75 posts worldwide.
The Foreign Agricultural Service has 150 to 165 FS personnel and APHIS has approximately 40, with FAS aiming for 20 or more new FS trainees in its Dec 2019 assessment process.
The U.South. Agency for Global Media has about 20 to 25 Strange Service employees worldwide.

For comparing's sake, the Department of Defense has 1.3 million agile-duty military machine members and about 800,000 reservists.

Diverseness. The Foreign Service recruits with diversity and inclusion in mind, and benefits from Pickering, Rangel and Payne (USAID) fellowships and other programs, which bring in about 100 Foreign Service members per year.

Diversity levels at recruitment and at lower grades are encouraging. As FS members rise through the ranks, however, the number of minorities and women thins out.

For example, at the end of FY2019, minority representation in State'due south Senior Foreign Service was depression. Equally of Sept. 30, African Americans comprised 2.ix percent of the Senior Foreign Service, Hispanic Americans 5.3 percent, and Asian Americans 3.half dozen pct.

In the words of AFSA President Eric Rubin, "We can exercise better. Nosotros must do better." To that terminate, the AFSA Governing Board has created a Committee on Variety and Inclusion, so AFSA can better monitor this phenomenon.

Attrition. AFSA continues to exist concerned with attrition numbers (via retirement and voluntary or nonvoluntary resignation), which can exist affected by many factors, including the existence of a diversity-friendly civilization (or lack thereof), management policies and leadership, and the availability of senior opportunities (or lack thereof).

State has informally told usa that compunction remains within historical annual averages (3 to 4 percent for FSOs; 4 to 6 percent for FS specialists), but these figures were gathered before the final quarter of the calendar twelvemonth, when most departures have identify. We volition know more in the first months of 2020.

We have some anecdotal show that in smaller Strange Service constituencies, compunction is higher than normal. Babe boomer retirements could play a office, only so could poor management or management bias, especially in cases of mid-level attrition.

FSOT. Over the past year, much attention has been paid to the number of test takers for the Foreign Service Officeholder Test, which is usually seen as a proxy for interest in a Foreign Service career. In calendar year 2019, 9,294 people took the FSOT—not unusual if we look at the past 20 years or so. The test is given in Feb, June and October.

Over the past two decades, there accept been many calendar years in which examination takers numbered in the 10,000 to 20,000 range, totals that appeared also in the 1980s and 1990s. (The dissonant year of 2002— subsequently the ix/11 attacks—saw 31,000 test takers.)

Simply ii times in the by 20 years were the calendar year FSOT examination-taker totals below 9,000—in 2000 and 2008.

This is probably because the economy was roaring only earlier the dot-com bosom and the fiscal crisis (or Corking Recession), respectively; at that place tends to exist an inverse correlation between the job market and FSOT test-taker numbers.

In general, if FSOT totals trend below nine,000, AFSA starts to worry. This yr, though June figures were below three,000, October numbers kept the annual total above 9,000.

AFSA will keep to runway data relevant to the Strange Service, particularly attrition and multifariousness numbers. 1 of AFSA's master roles in the past few years has been to provide unbiased data on the U.Due south. Strange Service to all who inquire, and we will continue to accept that office very seriously.

Please feel gratis to reach out to me or to my Labor Management colleagues with your questions about the Foreign Service. Happy New year!