The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2015 37 In a quest to become the “best diplomatic service in the world,” the U.K. establishes an institution dedicated to equipping its representatives with the necessary skills, knowledge and tradecraft. BY JON DAV I ES Jon Davies joined the United Kingdom’s Diplomatic Ser- vice in 1990. He has spent much of his career working in or on the Middle East, but has also served inMadrid and worked on consular issues in London. His latest overseas posting was as deputy head of mission in Cairo (2007- 2010). He then returned to London, first as Iran coordinator, then as director of the Middle East and North Africa office. Last year he took up his current position as director of the Diplomatic Academy. I t's an honor to be asked to contribute to The Foreign Service Journal. Throughout my 25 years in the Brit- ish Diplomatic Service, I have been lucky enough to serve with, and befriend, many brilliant, delightful colleagues from the U.S. State Department. I have learned much from them, and continue to do so in my current role as director of the Foreign and Common- wealth Office’s new Diplomatic Academy. It surprises many around the world—and indeed in our own country—to hear that until now, Britain has never had an institution dedicated to equipping its representatives with the skills, knowledge and tradecraft for diplomacy. Despite our long diplomatic history, or perhaps in part because of it, we have got this far without an equivalent of your Foreign Service Institute. Of course, that doesn’t mean we did no learning or training. For many years we had a Training Department, running a range of courses from induction onwards. We have a long tradition of language instruction. More recently, we have transformed the professionalism of our consular work. But there was still an expectation that those we recruited would become professional almost entirely “on the job.” Why Now? So why set up such a diplomatic training institution now? In essence, we have recognized that the expectation that we could rely on "on the job" training was increasingly unrealistic, and that we needed to ensure we could provide consistently strong learning across the whole range of what constitutes diplomacy. As William Hague, who was British Foreign Secretary at the time the creation of the Diplomatic Academy was announced, put it in a statement to the House of Commons last July: “The Academy, which will be a central part of the Foreign FOCUS ON DIPLOMACY: THE PROFESSION THE DIPLOMATIC ACADEMY A First for Britain’s Foreign Office