28 SEPTEMBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL FAMILY MEMBER Job Hunting AFTER THE PANDEMIC Donna Scaramastra Gorman’s articles have appeared in Time magazine, Newsweek, The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and the FSJ. A Foreign Service spouse, she has been posted in Moscow (three times), Yerevan, Almaty, Beijing, and Amman. She has worked as a consular associate, a human rights assistant, a CLO, a public diplomacy EPAP, a personal trainer, an associate editor for the Journal, and more, re-creating her résumé anew with each move. She currently lives in the D.C. area with her very recently retired Foreign Service spouse and works remotely for an EFM-owned communications consultancy. I’m a Foreign Service old-timer. My spouse joined the Foreign Service, and I became an EFM—that’s “eligible family member” for you newbies—back in the last century. It’s always fun to scare the new spouses with stories about the olden days, back before Jeff Bezos created Amazon, when we were just figuring out how to get dial-up internet in our houses, and blogs and FaceTime hadn’t yet been invented. A lot has changed since then, but one thing still seems to cause the same angst: spouse employment. When I “joined” the Foreign Service alongside my spouse, the employment landscape was severely limited at post. There was no such thing as “telework,” so we spouses all either chose not to work or we competed for the same few, frequently menial, jobs that were available at post. Although it was rumored to be possible, nobody I knew managed to find paid FOCUS ON FS FAMILIES AT WORK work outside the mission with any international organizations except the local international schools. Many of us grew bitter about the situation, and some of the people we joined with ended up leaving the Service because of it. We wanted to work, but the State Department, it seemed, didn’t want us. In the May 1991 FSJ, EFM author Katrina Ecton wrote: “The Foreign Service is wasting a valuable resource: spouses. The scarcity of employment for spouses in the United States and overseas is causing serious morale problems. Jobs are difficult to find, and a career for spouses is almost impossible.” Since that article was published, the work environment has slowly evolved—too slowly, most spouses would argue—to include a few professional jobs at many posts, and more options to work outside the mission, either on the local economy, with an international organization, or, more occasionally, remotely. More bilateral work agreements have been put in place, giving spouses at more posts the opportunity to work on the local economy. And some U.S. employers have become more open to remote work arrangements, allowing spouses with jobs in the U.S. to take those jobs with them when they move. When COVID-19 came along in 2020, it shut down many embassies but introduced the business world to the idea of remote workers. Zoom became not just a company but a verb. Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, and other software for connecting became the norm. All of these broad global changes made us wonder: Have any new employment opportunities opened up for EFMs overseas since the outside world went remote in 2020? As the pandemic winds down, turning into more of a A veteran Foreign Service family member explains how the search for employment is changing (and not changing) for FS spouses. BY DONNA SCARAMASTRA GORMAN
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