MSI

Further to my previous post on promotion within the Foreign Service, another way the Department rewards hard workers is through the process called a Meritorious Service Increase, or MSI (we have lots of acronyms in the Department).

As a bit of a background, up until a few years ago MSI's were rewarded to those employees whom the promotion boards deemed "doing a good job, but not enough to be promoted". This was the bridesmaid list. You did a very good job, but not enough for promotion, so we will give you an additional step increase. For Federal employment, pay is determined by your grade. In each grade there are steps. For IMS (like me) we all come in at a FS-05 (that is our grade). Our initial step is determined by many factors - prior Federal service, job experience, education, etc. The more of those "things" you have the higher step. After 1 year of service, we are all administratively promoted to an FS-04, step whatever. The "whatever" is determined by what step you were previously. So as an example, if you came in at an FS-05 step 14 (14 is the highest step you can have), when you are administratively promoted (or promoted to the next higher grade in general), you go up one grade to your closest step and over 2. So for FS-05 step 14 the pay is $79070/yr. Promoted to the next step you would be FS-04 step 9, or $84176/yr. You get an automatic step increase each year up until step 10, which then becomes every 2 years. If you want to look at the FS pay chart you can visit it here (look at the Overseas Comparability chart).

So back to my story. As I said up until a few years ago MSI's were rewarded by the promotions board if you did a good job but not good enough to warrant promotion. Then the Dept. changed the rules where MSI's are a separate process. Posts nominate worthy staff for an MSI. Before I departed Fiji the cable (a cable is official communication within the Department) came out for nominations for MSI's. I mentioned to my supervisor that I'd like to be nominated for an MSI, as I felt like I had done a bang up job. He said "sure thing, give me a list of bullet points". So I put together a list of accomplishments that I had done during my tour that I felt warranted me to be considered for an MSI.

My supervisor wrote it up (after I departed in April), I sent it off to Washington. There, our Bureau (the Bureau is the group in Washington that is responsible for a particular geographic region) reviews the nominations. If they agree the MSI is warranted, it is passed to the MSI review panel. If they disagree (or if the MSI panel disagrees) it is sent back to Post. The MSI panel convened in September.

About a week ago the results from the MSI panel came out. And I was on it. So for my tour in Fiji, I was promoted AND received an MSI. Double bonus!!

Now what?! I can't sit back on my laurels. Even though I'm not eligible for promotion for another 2-3 years, I can get another MSI during my current tour. The promotion panels look at all of your EER's, so I have to keep performing at a high level to increase the odds of promotion as soon as I'm eligible again.

Onward and upward....

Tenure...Finally!

An important milestone in ones Foreign Service career is obtaining tenure. For specialists, one goes up for tenure after 24-36 months of service. To be granted tenure by the tenure board, you have to show the ability to successfully perform throughout ones career (see 3 FAM 2250 for more details). You get three shots at tenure, and after the third try if you aren't granted tenured you are separated from the Service (ie shown the door). Sounds easy, right? For my class, it wasn't that easy.

My class (the 130th Specialist) went up for tenure the first time in September 2014. When the cable (a cable is State Department speak for an "official email") came out, we submitted our EERs (Employee Performance Review documents) to HR in Washington. Most people had 2 EERs. Myself, due to having multiple supervisors during my first tour, I had 2 EERs and 2 Memorandums of Performance. All of my performance documents said I was performing superbly and at a high level and should be granted tenure. 

On the day we were traveling to Suva, I got the email one doesn't want to see. Our CDO (Career Development Officer) emailed almost our entire class saying we were denied tenure. Needless to say, my class was in shock. Traditionally (for IRM at least) tenure was granted for the first time to 90-95% of those eligible. This time, 80% of my class was denied tenure. The reasoning from the board was (for all of us) was they wanted to see "more overseas experience" - whatever that means.

I will admit being denied tenure was a blow to my ego. But I was determined to get tenure the second time up. When I arrived in Suva and had my first meetings with both of my supervisors, I mentioned to them I didn't get tenure and wanted to get it the second time, and wanted to work closely with them to ensure I was doing everything possible to get it. I also had some phone conversations with my CDO (who by the way was excellent and reassuring to me) on what I needed to do. 

This past August the cable came out saying I was up for tenure again. This time, I spent a lot of time reflecting on not only my current EER, but my past EER's as well. One suggestion my CDO had was the tenure board looks closely at a section of your EER call "area for improvement". This is an area that your supervisor writes and says where you may have a weakness and what you should improve upon. There are about 7 categories to chose from. In my last EER, my supervisor said I needed to get more confidence in expressing my ideas to those at a higher grade than me. In discussions with my CDO, he said the board really wants to see how you are addressing your previous area for improvement. Before my EER was written, I had spent my time in Suva working on my area for improvement, ie gaining confidence in myself when expressing ideas to those at a higher grade. Due to Suva being a small Post, I have the luxury of having almost daily interactions with the Management Officer, Deputy Chief of Mission and Ambassador. 

When I wrote my EER, I made it a point to mention that I had taken the previous area for improvement to heart and what I was doing to work on it, with concrete examples. Also, at the suggestion of some colleagues, I wrote examples of what I was doing to impact not only Post but "big Washington". All in all, I spent about a month writing and editing my EER. In September, it was sent in to Washington and the wait began.

I was hoping to find out before Christmas if I had gotten tenure or not. One thing I failed to mention is before the cable saying you got tenure comes out, those who did not receive tenure had to be contacted by their CDO advising them they did not get it. That is the email/phone call one does not want to get. Every day I would wake up hoping not to see an email from my current CDO. A few weeks ago, a few of my classmates received the dreaded email. Since we all keep in touch, we were all scrambling to look and see if we got one. Nothing was in my inbox. For the next 3 days I held my breath hoping not to get the email. Nothing came in. A coworker of mine finally told me if I hadn't heard by now, I'm safe. Nothing is safe until I see the cable.

Finally about a week or so ago I got the news. It was via Facebook from a friend of mine. The post said "congratulations on tenure". I grabbed by Blackberry and sure enough there was the cable, saying I was granted tenure! I can't tell you how happy I was to have this lingering cloud gone.

So what happens now. Well I've sent in my information to Washington so they can send me a certificate (signed by the Secretary of State) saying I am a career member of the Foreign Service. When Officers are granted tenure, their tenure certificate is signed by the President. Also by being tenured, I am considered a mid-level officer. If need be, we can extend or curtail our tours without having to jump through as many hoops. We are also subject to time in class/time in service requirements for the current grade you are. Also, I am considered as "competitive service" in the Federal hiring process. 

In closing, it has been a somewhat stressful 3 years while waiting for tenure. I want to thank all of those who have helped me and given me suggestions along the way. I couldn't have done it without you. Also, a big thanks to Deb for having faith in me and keeping my spirits up when they were down. We did it!

Hip Hip...Hooray!

Richard's name was on a recently released cable listing the names of people who have earned tenure!

Hip Hip Hooray! Congrats & Cheers Richard!!

Warning: Geeky Post Ahead

Soon after Deb and I got married, I found out about a real cool product by Microsoft called Windows Home Server. This was a servery operating system (based on Server 2003) that was targeted towards home users. It came with preset shared folders (Music, Pictures, Software, etc) as well as "personal" folders for each user that you set up on the server. Plus (and this was the two big selling points to me) it had an application you could "push" to Windows machines in your home environment that would "back up" those machines daily as well had a feature called "drive extender" that took all of the hard drives you installed on the server and "pooled" them together to make one "big" drive (it copied data among all the drives and if you lost one drive, your data was still protected).

You could purchase the software for $99 and I set it up on an old Dell desktop I had. We then began a process of going "all digital", ie any paper we had we scanned it to files. Time consuming, but it saved a lot of space.

Well, in typical Microsoft fashion they released a new version of Home Server and then decided to cancel the program all together. Our old server was still churning along so I kept well enough alone. That is until I got offered my position in the State Department. Our server was pushing 10 years old, and while it was working fine there was always some concern in the back of my mind on what happens if a piece of hardware dies on the server. Since it was a Dell workstation, and it had some proprietary parts, would I be able to replace them? I started searching for a new solution.

My first thought was just to buy the biggest portable USB drive I could get and dump all of our data to it. It would be small (small enough to fit in a backpack if we had to get out of town quick), and fairly inexpensive. The downside was speed (USB, even at 3.0 isn't that fast), sharing between multiple computers and what happens if the drive dies. Most of those portable drives you cannot service yourself, and if it dies you could loose all of your data.

Option 2 was build another server. I was thinking about purchasing an HP Proliant and running something like FreeNAS on it. I had used FreeNAS on a previous project as a proof of concept to set up clustering/shared storage in the lab. This would give me the opportunity to have some redundancy (multiple discs in the server) and the ability to upgrade. The downside is I would have to devote time to setting it up and configuring it. With our upcoming move, time was something I really didn't' have. Plus, it was getting on the big side, and it wouldn't be something we could quickly take with us.

A few weeks ago, I got a daily alert from every computer geeks favorite store, NewEgg. They had as a daily deal a Drobo 5N on sale for $150 off of retail price. I had been looking at Drobos for a while. It had everything I wanted (multiple drive bays, easy to set up, small/portable and had a network interface). Usually the price was out of my ballpark. However this was too good of a price to pass up. I placed the order along with an order for a Western Digital Red 2TB hard drive which was also on sale. The WD Red series are designed for NAS (Network Attached Storage), ie they are designed to be "on" 24x7x365 and have a high MTBF. In our old server I had 2 x 1TB Western Digital Green drives. the WD Green series are designed for low power consumption. I had read some reviews where people who used them in NAS devices had issues with them Green drives dropping out of the drive pool when they go in to their power save mode. I never had any problems. I decided to recycle those drives in the Drobo, so I would have a total of 3 drives (with two spare drive bays for expansion).

I got the Drobo as well as the drive in. Hooked it up and within 20 minutes it was up and running. I did the initial configurations and created shares just like we had on the Windows server. I made a copy of all our data to a USB drive we purchased, just in case something bad happened. Then I xcopied all of the files from the Windows server to the new Drobo. Within a few hours, all of our data was copied over and everything was working perfectly. All of our computers could see the Drobo and shares (we have Windows and Mac). I decommissioned the old server, re-installed XP and donated the computer to Goodwill.

So far everything is working fine with the Drobo. We have it set up in our temporary housing (ie my parents house). We will take it to DC with us for training and then it will travel with us overseas. I just ordered another 2TB WD Red drive (got in onsale from Newegg) so we will increase our storage capacity.

My next task is to try and see if a cloud storage provider will allow backups "from" the Drobo. That way we will have an offsite copy of all our data.

Next Stop...the World!!

"It is my pleasure to formally extend to you an appointment offer to join the July 15, 2013 Specialist Orientation Class as an Information Management Specialist"!

With that, I have officially been offered (and have accepted) a position with the US State Department as an Information Management Specialist. Huh? What is this? Basically we're joining the Foreign Service. The State Departments description of what the duties of IMS are can be found here (note this is a link for an old IMS vacancy announcement).

To give you a little back story on my application process and history. I first heard of the IMS opening about 2 years ago (2011?). My first application didn't make it past the QEP. The application process is nothing like I've ever experienced before. Besides submitting a resume (which you have to do through the USAJobs, which in and of itself is an experience). The application consists of answering questions regarding your experience (not just in IT but in your professional and personal life) as well as essays. Yes essays. You submit the application, along with your resume, college transcripts, and copies of any IT certifications you may have. If you do not have a degree in some sort IT area, you have to have a certification from the Department of States "approved" certification list. I have both my CISSP and MCITP:SA/MCSA:2008, however you only need one on the list of approved certifications.

After you submit your paperwork, you wait to hear back (soon after the position closes) whether or not you meet the "minimum" qualifications (whatever those are). Your application is then passed to the Qualification Evaluation Panel, or QEP. This part can take 2-3 months, as they review in detail your application, resume, etc and determine if they think you would make a good candidate for the Foreign Service. If you pass the QEP, you get invited to travel to Washington DC, on your own dime, for an all day interview, aka the Oral Assessment (OA). During the OA, you have more essays to write, multiple choice tests, and then about a 2-3 hour face to face interview. More details on the OA process can be found on the Foreign Service Specialist Study Guide, located on the State Departments website. Anyone who has gone through this process can attest to how stressful this is. Once you are done with the face to face interview, you go back to the waiting room while the assessors calculate your scores. The OA score is on a scale of 1-7, and it is calculated based on how you do on the essays, tests and your oral interview. Usually, you need to score about a 5.3 or higher to move on (aka "pass") the OA. Once your score is calculated, they call you back and you find out your score. If you make the cutoff, you are given a tentative offer, and have a chance to talk to the assessors in a more personal setting about life in the foreign service, etc. Once you are done, you have an initial meeting with security, where you review your SF-86. The SF-86 is basically where you document your entire life history - where you have lived, worked, known, traveled, etc. One of the requirements for the Foreign Service is you have to have a Top Secret clearance. If everything is "good" you certify and release the SF-86 for DoS security to begin their background investigation on you. And just when you think you are done....

Welcome to the medical clearance! Department of State mandates that not only does the potential Foreign Service Specialist have a Class 1 Medical Clearance (aka worldwide availability), anyone who may be travelling with you has to be cleared medically as well. Basically, what you have to get is what is commonly called a "fit for duty" physical. There are all sorts of tests, blood draws, x-rays etc you and your family have to get. Deb and I were fine with the physicals, but it was stressful on Clarissa and Mason because they both had to get blood draws. Mason didn't like it, but we bribed him with some Legos he really wanted. Clarissa, that almost broke my heart. During the blood draw she was screaming and kept asking "why mommy why daddy?" I almost called off the whole thing, because as a dad I did not like seeing my daughter suffer. Half way through her draw, the blood stopped flowing and the nurse said they would have to draw in her other arm! Not fun. Clarissa also benefited from the guilt and got a trunk of sparkly princess dresses and crowns. Since I have a history of asthma and allergies, I went one step further and scheduled an appointment with my allergist. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For the past umpteen years I have been on allergy injections. When I was reviewing the document with my allergist, he did a few tests on me and determined I no longer needed to be on allergy injections!! He also took me off any medication I had and said "use it when you need to"! We submitted all of our forms and paperwork to the DoS Medical Office and within a week we all had our Class 1 Clearance! Next up...

Security Clearance! All members of the Foreign Service are required to have and maintain a security clearance. For various reasons I'm not going to go in to much detail here, but there is information online regarding the clearance process. It's not that painful. You fill out a bunch of paperwork (SF-86) on your life going back a certain number of years (employment history, life history, where you've lived, people who know you, etc). You submit the initial documentation when/if you pass the OA in DC. Roughly 30 days or so after your OA (again if you pass), you are then contacted by a Diplomatic Security officer to schedule your face to face interview. He/she will go over the documents with you, discuss any points they may find/need clarification on, confirm the information on the acquaintances you mentioned, and then they will start doing their research. Usually this takes a few weeks, and then they compile their findings in to a report and send it in to DoS for adjudication. This process and the time it takes for adjudication is somewhat a mystery. It can take up to a few weeks or a few months. Once your clearance is granted...

Congratulations, you've made it on the register. The register is the list of people (for the position you applied for) who have made it through all of the hoops I mentioned above. Your ranking on the register is the score you got at the OA plus any foreign language points and/or prior military service. I didn't have any of the later, but my OA score was a 5.9 (out of possible 7). You can contact the registrars office to find out your ranking. I was 4 out of 19 people, so I knew that I was almost definitely going to get called for the next Specialist class.  Now it was just waiting on the next class to get announced...

And that leads us to where we are today. At the beginning of May I got the official "offer" to join the next Foreign Service Specialist Class, which is scheduled for July 17. Once you accept the offer, there are more forms to fill out, and preparation to begin. We are in the midst of trying to sell out house (anyone want to buy a house?!), schedule our pack out date (one perk of the State Department, if you are in the Foreign Service they send movers to pack up all of your stuff, and ship it to your assignment or store it for you).

So that is what has been happening with us the past (almost) 3 years. This has been a long process, but our fun is just about to begin!

We're Going On a Trip!