The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 29 T HE C OMPUTER A IDED J OB E VALUATION PROCESS IS INTENDED TO GIVE F OREIGN S ERVICE N ATIONALS THEIR DUE . B UT IT ISN ’ T WORKING AS WELL AS IT SHOULD . B Y A LEXIS L UDWIG F O C U S O N F S S T A F F I N G any of us in the Foreign Service have had the privilege, and pleasure, of work- ing closely with some truly extraordinary Foreign Service National colleagues. Often it is they who do the real work of the mission while the Americans, demonstrating good management skills, stand aside and let them get it done. It cannot be said often enough that FSNs are the real experts on the local terrain, safeguarding the insti- tutional memory at most posts. Equally important, they are the indispensable guide for the wide-eyed and innocent newcomer Americans, helping to orient us to the problems and the tools to tackle them more quick- ly than we could ever hope to do without them. We ignore their advice at our peril. While I certainly don’t mean to belittle the crucial contributions of the majority of FSNs who work in administrative support to keep posts up and running, our paychecks coming and our housing in livable shape, I’ll reveal my personal bias here by asserting that the relatively small group of Foreign Service National col- leagues who work alongside us in our political, eco- nomic and public affairs sections deserve to be singled out for special recognition. Their educational and professional backgrounds are often comparable or even superior to those of many Foreign Service generalists. (They are often expected to have an advanced university degree, whereas no such requirement exists to become a Foreign Service officer or specialist.) Many of them have served as gov- ernment officials, journalists, politicians, lawyers or academics before joining the staffs of our embassies and consulates. And they know their own culture and language, and their country’s social and political power structures, much more intimately than we ever will. In short, Foreign Service Nationals are our peers in the broadest possible sense. But do we truly recognize and reward their contributions to the success of our diplomatic missions? A Gilded “CAJE” This brings me to my main subject: the Computer Aided Job Evaluation, or CAJE. Anyone who has worked with FSNs during the past year or so has become familiar with this unfortunately apt acronym. CAJE is the formidable logistical effort, already well under way, to classify (or reclassify) all FSN positions in every post in the world according to fixed criteria in a consolidated computer database. In the most benign interpretation, CAJE is a neces- sary move to bring the FSN side of the State Department’s human resource system into the modern M L IBERATING FSN S FROM T HEIR “CAJE”