TSB at The Skeptical Bureaucrat ("From deep inside the foundations of our Republic's capital city") provided his take on the midlevel staffing gap.
Money quote(s):
"I've been browsing the GAO report on Foreign Service staffing gaps, which is discussed by Domani Spero today, and particularly the portion on Civil Service to Foreign Service conversions. She noted the comically insufficient extent of those conversions"
&
"According to the GAO report, State "opened" only 88 CS employees to conversion in 2011, of which a mere 26 applied. Those 26 were winnowed down to 7 who were given the opportunity to convert, only four of whom were actually converted. With numbers like those, something tells me State really isn't all that into the whole idea of Civil Service conversion." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
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"State hires for FS positions only at the entry pay grades, which max out at the FP-04 level. That means the CS employees who are most likely to be conversion candidates would take a big pay cut, even if there were some flexibility as to the exact step within that pay grade at which a converted employee might enter.
By "big" I mean about 50 percent, assuming the conversion candidate is a GS-13 pay grade employee who has been around ten or more years.
Even that temporary Chief of Mission job would lose its appeal if I had to take such a severe financial haircut to convert. " (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
With the exception of our Foreign Service Specialist colleagues, State Department's Civil Service cadre are probably the best-prepared, most-likely-to-be-successful group of candidates for conversion into the Foreign Service.
7/17
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