The Foreign Service Journal, February 2010

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 51 bottom of a drawer in my home of- fice. They don’t mean much out- side of the Service. But managing exchanges; designing culturally- sensitive programs to meet long- term goals; negotiating around conflicts; engaging citizens around the world person by person, and family by family, strengthening the ties that unite nations and people — these are all skills I honed in the Foreign Service and continue to use every day. Marianne Scott Washington, D.C. “N O ‘E X -FSO’ E VER F OUND A J OB ” Since leaving the Foreign Service more than 30 years ago, I’ve enjoyed two careers: as a nonprofit chief staff ex- ecutive in Washington, D.C., and as a home-based writer. My varied work experiences and “lessons learned” over the past 14 years essentially confirm what I found during my initial post-Foreign Service job search: 1. While the outside world has great respect for the Foreign Service as a public service career, we need to translate our State Department experiences into the lan- guage of whatever new field we choose to enter. 2. Skills in “policy” and “analysis” are fine, but people who work in the non-State world are seeking evidence of concrete actions and quantifiable results. 3. Resumés get interviews; interviews get jobs. Dur- ing that crucial meeting with the potential employer, re- member that their silent question is “How can you help me achieve my goals and make money?” 4. While you are still working in the department, begin to make contacts in those professional areas — especially niche markets — where you have a special advantage or expertise. As for the relevance of the Foreign Service to any new career, all of us who are graduates of that excellent fin- ishing and preparatory school — the U.S. Department of State —have learned many valuable lessons and acquired certain useful skills. For me, the experience of writing in the Foreign Service, especially the emphasis on rapid drafting for a deadline, proved to be one of the best preparations for my post-government career. And then there is the excellent advice I received during the de- partment’s first-rate Job Search Program. One day, my counselor in that program came up with an effective epigram to make the point that each of us, when we leave Mother State, must also leave be- hind all concerns with status, rank and title. As this kindly older gentleman advised me: “No ‘ex- FSO’ ever found a job.” Robert S. Pace Vienna, Va. A N ONGOVERNMENTAL F OREIGN S ERVICE E QUIVALENT My post-retirement career as a theologian and an An- glican priest is one not ordinarily associated with the For- eign Service. Yet my FS experience is my main resource for it. This counterintuitiveness may make it all the more relevant to a serious question: Is there life after the For- eign Service? I will begin with my 29-year service and its lessons. I started in a predecessor of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, where I conducted analysis and research on Southeast Asia. There I was exposed to brilliant reporting from Embassy Bangkok on the factions contending for power in the Thai government. I learned not only what incisive analysis looked like, but also never to take official pronouncements or surface appearances at face value. Their value was instead as pointers to what was actually going on, arrived at through discerning the motives of of- ficials making them. Subsequently I had postings in Viet- nam (twice), Pakistan, Zaire (now the Democratic Repub- lic of the Congo), Korea and Laos. These obliged me to grasp the differences between Western and non-Western cultures. Turning now to theology and ministry, I would note that biblical studies are central to both. When I went to seminary —during my Foreign Service career — I found that there had been a revolution in biblical criticism. For example, instead of taking the Gospels as the New Testa- ment’s eyewitness accounts of Jesus, scholars had probed them for indications of the date and place of their com- F O C U S The experience of writing in the FS proved to be one of the best preparations for my post-government career.