The QEP Gods Have Spoken

This blog has been pretty quiet for the past few weeks because there simply hasn't been any news to report. I mean, I took the FSOT in early October, received notification that I passed it in late October, and submitted my PNs in mid-November. After that, radio silence. I successfully blocked this process out of my mind for most of the time since then, but with the new year starting, the anxiety-laced anticipation began creeping back into my subconscious.

The Qualifications Evaluation Panel (QEP) stage of this process is the most opaque because nobody really knows how good is good enough to pass in any given year. I passed it last year and thought I had a good shot at passing it this year. But there have indeed been cases where people who passed one year did not make it the following year. Budgets are tight. Hiring registers are long. Word on the street is that State wants to reduce the number of candidates who expire from the register without getting a job offer. Candidates who never receive a job offer constitute a financial liability for State, which conducts medical exams and security investigations for all of these candidates regardless of whether they are hired. These exams and investigations aren't cheap. Knowing this, I'd surmise that State is trying to reduce the number of candidates who advance to the hiring register, and the best way to do this is by lowering the number of candidates invited to the Oral Assessment (OA).

I would estimate that out of an FSOT cohort of about 7000 candidates, fewer than 300 remain. State says that "only a few hundred" candidates advance to the OA each year. And with three testing cohorts per year, three OA groups of about 300 candidates each put you right under 1000, which is no longer "a few hundred." So if these figures are accurate, only about 5% of the candidates who took the FSOT in October are still in the game.

Fortunately, I am one of the survivors. The QEP gods have given me a second chance. I received the email with the good news yesterday. That still hasn't sunk in.

Anyway, knowing that there's no guarantee I will make it back to this stage in the future, I really really REALLY want to go all the way this time around. I accept that I failed the OA on my first attempt because I didn't know exactly what to expect (beyond what was mentioned in the official study guide). The snow day and OA cancellation and empty stomach and loss of heat in my hotel room and all that crap made for a toxic set of circumstances that was not conducive to optimal performance that fateful day in March of last year. I almost pulled it out though. But knowing that as an FSO, there will likely be many situations similar to this in which I would still need to perform, I need to keep my wits about me and focus on the task at hand. I know where I went wrong last time, so that's where I want to focus most of my energy regarding my OA preparations. But I'll save that for another post.

In the meantime, I have to decide when to take this thing. Fortune smiles!