The Foreign Service Journal, April 2009

E very Information Resource Management specialist I know is pursuing information tech- nology industry certifications or other types of continuing education. This high level of motivation to expand job- related skills through self-study is a di- rect result of the Skills Incentive Pay program. I believe that lessons learned from the success of the SIP program can be applied to the Language Incentive Pay program, which offers Foreign Service employees higher earnings for profi- ciency in hard languages while serving in a hard-language country. With a few adjustments, LIP could become a more powerful tool for motivating em- ployees to raise their linguistic profi- ciency through self-study. Elevating information technology expertise and broadening ability in languages such as Mandarin Chinese or Arabic are both important goals for the Department of State and other foreign affairs agencies. And encour- aging employees to improve their skill sets through self-study without having to take them out of the work force for long-term training is even more bene- ficial. During my four years of duty in China, I have obtained both a Mi- crosoft Certified Systems Engineer Certification and a 3/3 in Mandarin Chinese through a mixture of formal classroom and self-study. I earned my MCSE entirely through self-study, while my language rating reflects 44 weeks of training at the Foreign Serv- ice Institute in Washington followed by three years of self-study. As a re- sult of those efforts, I am currently re- ceiving both Skills Incentive Pay and Language Incentive Pay. Over the past four years, I have been struck by the difference be- tween the motivation levels of For- eign Service employees trying to improve their Mandarin scores and IRM specialists pursuing industry cer- tifications and continuing education. To be blunt, the amount of informa- tion technology self-study taking place among IRM specialists vastly outstrips the hard language self-study that I have observed among any group of State employees. Initially, this seemed strange to me, given the fact that language incentive pay is significantly greater than skills incentive pay. But when I examined the structure of each program more closely, the key difference between the two became clear. While SIP encour- ages self-study, LIP does not. In fact, in some ways the LIP program dis- courages individual pursuit of fluency. LIP and SIP Compared Here are some key structural dif- ferences between the two programs. Reasonable Goals: While SIP re- wards are less lucrative than those of LIP, they are achievable in a shorter amount of time. (One can obtain a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer Certification in six months or less of self-study.) LIP rewards are greater, but only attainable after extremely long periods of study. In general, a new speaker of a hard foreign lan- guage will need to spend 88 weeks of study or around 1,800 hours of class time to reach the current minimum required for incentive pay, a 3/3, in that language. Self-Study vs. State Department- Sponsored Training: Because SIP re- quirements cannot all easily be achiev- ed through FSI training alone, IRM specialists are motivated to pursue them on their own. In contrast, for new speakers of a hard language, LIP rewards are almost exclusively achiev- ed through FSI training. It is thus rare to find a new speaker of a difficult lan- guage who achieves a 3/3 through a self-directed program. Positions Linked to Ability: 3/3 lan- Enabling employees to sharpen skills without leaving the work force would be a win-win. S PEAKING O UT Expanding Language Capacity Through Incentive Pay B Y M ARK A LLEN A P R I L 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13

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