The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2016 11 Professional Training AFSA President Barbara Stephenson says that training acquired through assignments is the primary form of training in the Foreign Service (Presi- dent’s Views, May FSJ ). Frankly I see t his as a great problem. Training through assignments, and the often-absent quality mentoring, is at best a hit-or-miss situation. Any serious diplomatic establishment should have a proper diplomatic school or acad- emy where new entrants can have a minimum of one year of full-time career training, or ideally two years. This is especially essential at a time when we are emphasizing diversity. Diversity is a great advantage to the Service, but the diverse backgrounds of the candidates must be fleshed out with career-related material. In the early days of the Service, when most entrants had studied subjects at university closely tied to the needs of the department’s work, that was not too important. That is no longer the case, however, and therefore must be rem- edied. We are falling very short on this score and thus doing a great disservice to many new officers. Robert Illing FSO, retired Porto, Portugal Correction The photo in Sarah Sewall’s “Corrup- tion: A 21st-Century Security Challenge,” in the June FSJ , was wrongly captioned. The photo on p. 21 shows Under Secretary Sewall discussing links between corruption, human trafficking and illegal fishing with port security officials in Thailand, not her visit to a police station in Guatemala. We regret the error, which has been cor- rected in the FSJ’ s online edition. n