What does it take to become an ambassador or high consular officer?
OK, this my last post in response to your question. Sorry for going ballistic. There aren’t many questions posted to AskMe that I know this much about. If you want to become an ambassador, it will probably take you 20 years or more if you go the career State Department route, and that’s if you’re lucky, politically popular, and very talented. Once you are hired by the State Department, you are required to be promoted every so often or you lose your job. And unlike in high school, there are not pity promotions. I believe that you have up to 11 years to be promoted. But you can only be promoted if you go through a procedure called “opening your window,” and once you open that window you have to be promoted within six years. People who play it safe tend to wait five years after a promotion before opening that window, but this makes for slow career advancement. And there is a maximum age for the Foreign Service–sixty-somthing, I think–after which you must retire. If you get promoted high
My two cents: LairBobs distinction between outwards (ambassadors) and inwards (consulate) work can be nuanced a bit. The consulate part also deals with granting of visas to foreigners wanting to go to the country, especially when applying to immigrate etc. But it definitely is more bureacratic and administrative in nature, only rarely involving direct negotiations between countries. The ambassadors/political style work can also be very inward looking, as in promoting financial and business interests and so on. I don’t know too much about the American foreign service, but it seems to me that the politically appointed ambassadors usually go to smaller places (as e.g. the american ambassador here in [small Scandinavian capital] who, if a career diplomat, makes me doubt the existence of the vigorous testing described above). It seems that the top-dogs at the more important places (UN, London, Berlin, Paris etc) are all career diplomats or otherwise skilled and educated in the fine art of c
I don’t know about the old boy’s club. For one thing, the State Department started aggressively trying to hire women and minorities back in the 1970s. A number of its top diplomats today weren’t even born in the US, though I believe citizenship is a prerequisite to hiring. My dad served in the Foreign Service for nearly 30 years before retiring a few years ago, and he was a public high school and public university graduate. He served alongside people with a lot of different backgrounds–I remember one 40-something guy who had just entered at the junior levels, having taken and passed the tests when he got fed up with a career in zoology; other people entered from the military and some didn’t even have college degrees. I do think you have to be pretty good at milking your connections to get promoted to the top levels within the Foreign Service, but these are connections you form through relationships you build as you move up the ranks. Once you make it into the Foreign Service you “bid”
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