AFSA FCS Vice President Update October 16, 2006 AFSAnet

AFSA FCS Vice President Update: October 16, 2006

On October 10, 2006 the Director General sent worldwide an “Assignments Cycle” message to encourage bidding on “hardship assignments”. He noted that officers who have just completed hardship assignments receive a preference for onward assignments and that the service conversely seeks to fill current hardship posts with officers who have not previously served in hardship assignments. He also noted the relative increase in the number of hardship posts in recent times, though CS has far fewer “extreme hardship” posts than State or AID given that we staff posts in countries with significant trade relations with the United States and conversely do not staff posts in the poorest of countries which State and to an even greater extent AID serve.

The DG’s message stated that “the Assignments Panel will require every bidder to list at least one (at-grade) hardship assignment.” On October 13, 2006, CDAS (Angela Dawkins) sent a “clarification” which noted that quote According to the Guidelines for Bidders, an officer who has not served in a hardship assignment in the past eight years is required to submit a minimum of two bids on hardship positions unquote. This clarification therefore amends three points:

Of course, one may ask what is the definition of a “hardship post”? According to the post bidding tool on I-bid (as of October 4, 2006), there were 105 FCS posts worldwide, of which 55 or over half had a 5 percent or greater differential. In fact, these are the “hardship posts” even though there is a great difference between serving in 5 percent posts like Amman or Dubai (or the 10 percent posts in Brazil like Brasilia, Sao Paulo and even Rio!) and serving in 25 percent posts like Islamabad, Jakarta or Lagos, but for bidding requirement purposes they are all equally “hardship” assignments. This in effect means that officers have a broad range of choices to meet their hardship bidding requirements both in geographic and living standard terms.

Finally, interestingly China and India as the two top USDOC/ITA/USFCS priority export target markets account for 8 of the 55 hardship posts.