The FSOT multiple-choice section is designed to weed out unqualified candidates who simply don't have the knowledge base or behavioral traits to be successful officers in the Foreign Service. The FSOT written essay is designed to further weed out the candidates who cannot write quickly, persuasively or articulately. I have read that only about 40-45% of FSOT takers actually pass, so if you are moving onto the next round, then congratulations! Compared to the FSOT, the next step in the process is much easier and much more frustrating at the same time. So, let's dive right in!
Step 4: The Personal Narratives and Qualifications Evaluation Panel
The Personal Narratives (PN) and Qualifications Evaluation Panel (QEP) stage is the stage where the Foreign Service Board of Examiners separates the merely smart people and talented test takers from the actual Foreign Service finalists. As mentioned earlier, this stage consists of two sections: Personal Narratives and the Qualifications Evaluation Panel. You only have control over the PN section, and you have about three weeks after receiving notification that you passed the FSOT to submit them. You do not have to complete all the PNs at once, but once they have been submitted, they can no longer be edited.
Section 1: Personal Narratives
The PN stage requires you to compose six long-form answers to questions about various traits you may have. Each narrative is restricted to 1300 characters, which includes spaces and punctuation marks. The PN stage gives you the opportunity to provide examples from your past that reflect the critical "six precepts" the Foreign Service seeks in its officers. You can draw from your personal experiences, professional experiences, or academic experiences. For each PN, you are required to provide the name of someone who can vouch for you or the experience. This person can be a coworker, supervisor, neighbor or friend. Note that it cannot be a subordinate or a family member. Verifiers do not have to be American citizens, but they do need to be able to understand English in the event that they are contacted.
You do not need to address all six precepts in each narrative, but you should ensure that all six of your narratives cover all six precepts at least once. You don't have a lot of space for each narrative, so writing concisely is critical. You should also be mindful of cutting and pasting from word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word. Special characters like apostrophes, quotation marks and commas may not show up correctly in the text window on the Pearson VUE webpage where you submit the actual narratives. It should go without saying that your narratives should be free of grammatical and spelling errors. So read your PNs carefully and enlist the help of a friend to help you proofread.
Section 2: Qualifications Evaluation Panel
Once your six PNs have been typed up and submitted, your overall application will be reviewed by the Foreign Service Board of Examiners (BEX), which consists of current senior FSOs. The BEX will examine your total file, which includes your FSOT scores, your PNs and your registration information (work history, educational background, etc.). They will then compare your file with other candidates' files within your chosen career track. Thus, political-track candidates' files are compared with other political-track candidates' files. The BEX then ranks all candidates within each of the five tracks and decides which candidates to invite to the next round of the Foreign Service application process.
Many talented candidates are frustrated by this step because no feedback is given regarding the strengths or weaknesses of individual PNs or how many candidacies were ended or extended at this particular stage. In other words, you can fail this stage and not know why. Additionally, personal narratives that might have been sufficient for advancing to the next round in one year might be insufficient for advancing in another year. Or a candidate's PNs might be good enough to advance to the next round in one career track, but not another track even with the same PNs.
DOS will not release statistics of how many people within each career track are invited to the next round of the process. However, they do acknowledge that the number of people who pass this stage is dependent on anticipated hiring needs. So if there is a pressing need for economic officers, for example, then more candidates who chose the economics track will be advanced to the next round. Officially, DOS has said that over the past seven years or so, the pass rate for the QEP stage has ranged from 5-100% for all career tracks. One candidate whose candidacy ended before being selected as an FSO filed a Privacy Act request and learned that only the candidates ranked in the top 19% of his career track for his particular cohort made it to the next round.
This stage is why your initial registration materials are so important. If you received any special awards, certifications, degrees, promotions, or honors, hopefully you listed those in your FSOT registration materials. If you have foreign language proficiency, hopefully you included this as well. You never know what the cutoff will be within a career track for any particular cohort, so that's why you want to be as thorough as you can with your registration materials and your PNs. Because of how competitive this stage is, many candidates are understandably guarded about helping each other--especially if they are in the same career track.
Results of the QEP stage are mailed to candidates about two to three months after the PN submission deadline. If your candidacy ends here, you will have to start the process all over again with the FSOT. (And yes, the one-FSOT-in-11-months stipulation still applies.) For what it's worth, I will admit to being stopped in my tracks twice at this stage. So if you are denied the opportunity to continue your candidacy beyond the QEP, don't feel too bad. It is apparently quite common. If you made it to this stage once before, you can surely do it again.
If you received good news in your QEP results letter, however, then you are eligible to participate in the most intense stage of the hiring process yet: the Oral Assessment (OA), which will be covered in the next post.
To be continued...
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