 ngela Price Aggeler describes it as something of a Kafkaesque experience. Last Sept. 14 the former State Civil Service personnel specialist awoke transformed into a Foreign Service officer. "With the magical flourish of a bureaucratic wand, my organization, even my skill code, changed," she said with a smile.
Transfers between the Foreign Service and Civil Service aren't quite that simple, but they're a lot more common than many people realize. Last year alone, more than a dozen State employees switched between the two services, for either personal or professional reasons.
William Weech, a Civil Service instructor at the Foreign Service Institute, said he served "10 happy years in the Foreign Service" before making the transfer. With three overseas tours under his belt, he landed an assignment at FSI, where he returned to what he calls his "real vocational passion: international training." Rather than moving on to another overseas assignment, he applied for and got a job as a Civil Service trainer at FSI.
Jim Brown, a language officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, has transferred between the Civil Service and Foreign Service personnel systems six times. He joined State in 1981 as a Civil Service interpreter in the Office of Language Services. Two years later, he received a limited Foreign Service appointment to Beijing, where Chinese language officers were needed critically. Mr. Brown has served in Beijing for 14 years, 10 of them under the Foreign Service personnel system.
David Whitten, executive director for the U.S. Information Agency's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, was a Foreign Service officer in Vietnam, an assignment cut short by the U.S. evacuation in 1975.
During his follow-on assignment in the "E" Bureau--at that time, part of State--Mr. Whitten maintained close ties with the Vietnamese friends he'd made while working in the refugee camps who had resettled in the United States. But when the time came for him to bid for an overseas posting, he had to make some choices. "I knew I was going to have to get back overseas if I hoped to get anywhere as a Foreign Service officer," he said. "I still felt a responsibility to my Vietnamese friends, and I liked living in Washington."
Mr. Whitten said he didn't want to "play the game of claiming to be worldwide available but needing 'just one more year' before going overseas." So his sympathetic office director helped him transfer to the Civil Service.
"I went home on a Friday in the Foreign Service and came back to the same job on Monday in the Civil Service," he said. "The only bad moment I recall was a comment by my Foreign Service career counselor to the effect that I was never to darken her door again."
Mr. Weech, too, said switching from the Foreign Service was "surprisingly painless." Once he applied for and was offered his Civil Service job, he said FSI's personnel office took care of the necessary paperwork. "It took a while to get some payroll issues completely straightened out," he said. "But all in all, the process was pretty simple."
William Weech, center, transferred to the Civil Service as a Foreign Service Institute instructor.
Not all transfers have gone so smoothly. Ms. Aggeler said the same wand that transferred her from the Civil Service to the Foreign Service "wasn't as capable of transferring leave balances or service computation dates."
Mr. Brown said incompatibilities between the two personnel systems resulted in "tremendous confusion over allowances such as evacuation from post, language incentives, rest and recreation, home leave and awards." Although his job, title, responsibilities and working hours remained the same during his conversion to Civil Service status, he said he lost 15 percent of his income as well as R&R and home leave benefits.
Nancy Serpa, the deputy chief of mission in Lagos who has "crossed over" between the two services twice in her 25-year career, said she encountered "some kind of roadblock at just about every step of the way."
She entered the Foreign Service as a junior officer in 1973 and served three tours abroad before being assigned to Washington, D.C., in 1981. After marrying an entrepreneur who was unable to move overseas, Ms. Serpa converted to the Civil Service in 1988. Ten years later, after her husband sold his business, she was offered the DCM position in Nigeria.
Ms. Serpa said she considered taking the job on an excursion tour, accepting a temporary Foreign Service appointment and reentering the Civil Service when she returned to Washington, D.C. "But after some research with some very helpful people in the Personnel Bureau," she said, "I opted to attempt reinstatement into the Foreign Service" because it would offer better retirement benefits.
Nancy Serpa, center, rejoined the Foreign Service last year.
But transferring between the services, she acknowledges, hasn't been easy. "The two systems are very different and the road between them is not easy," she said. When she converted to the Civil Service in 1988, the process was "arduous." Likewise, her reinstatement into the Foreign Service--a process, she said, "very clearly envisioned in regulation, so one that I thought would be routine"--took six months. "There are bureaucratic obstacles that hinder, rather than facilitate, travel between the two services," Ms. Serpa said.
A temporary sojourn into the Civil Service might not have been the best thing for her Foreign Service career, she said, but Ms. Serpa has no regrets. "We had a stable start to our marriage, had one child and were able to adopt two more, and renovated our home," she said. "For personal reasons, it was well worth it."
Mr. Whitten, now a member of USIA's Senior Executive Service, admits that while he initially felt that he was "betraying the club" when he left the Foreign Service, he's enjoyed a career in which "coming to work is a joy."
He admits that he sometimes feels "a twinge of envy" when a Foreign Service colleague prepares to leave for a particularly plum assignment. "But I'm not sorry for the decision I made 20 years ago," he said. "The Civil Service has been very good to me. And my Vietnamese friends are all doing very well." *
Making the Switch
Transferring between the Foreign Service and Civil Service can offer exciting new career opportunities, but sometimes it requires employees to take a professional step backward--however temporary.
Foreign Service members who transfer to the Civil Service compete for a specific job at a specific grade in a specific location.
But according to Gale Rogers, deputy director of the mid-level assignments division in the Office of Career Development and Assignments, Civil Service employees can transfer to the Foreign Service in two different ways.
Some who meet specific criteria--such as having served four of the past six years overseas in a career field with a deficit at the employee's grade--may qualify to transfer at a Foreign Service grade commensurate with their Civil Service grade. But others, Ms. Rogers explained, are recruited at the entry level and accept pay cuts and loss of tenure.
In pursuing a transfer, she said, employees must accept the guidelines of the service they join. Foreign Service members who switch to the Civil Service, for example, recognize that they will generally not qualify for retirement as early as in the Foreign Service. In addition, they generally will not be promoted or change positions unless they actively seek out a new job.
Civil Service employees who join the Foreign Service recognize that they will be required to transfer to new assignments and posts throughout their careers and will be permitted to remain no more than four years at a given post. In addition, they accept that they are subject to the Foreign Service's "up or out" policy that requires them to continually be promoted during their careers to remain in the service.
For more information about transfers from the Civil Service to the Foreign Service, contact Ms. Rogers at (202) 647-2790 or on the Department's unclassified email system. For information about transferring from the Foreign Service to the Civil Service, consult the executive office of the bureau with the advertised position.
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