The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005

I also want to say that the Leadership and Management School has done an absolutely fan- tastic job of meeting and exceed- ing the requirements. They have added additional courses to meet an increased demand for the mandatory courses, and are ahead of the number of employees we have agreed to train before the end of calendar year 2006. FSJ: Are there any plans to revive the Senior Seminar? If not, what will take its place? KP: There are no plans to revive the Senior Seminar. It made sense when it was the only training offered to senior officers, but it was an expensive program to run and only 15 State Department employees could participate each year. We determined that many more seniors need- ed leadership training than could be accommodated by the Senior Seminar. Also, much of the sub- stance of the course would be much more useful if acquired ear- lier in an employee’s career. But we didn’t abolish the Senior Seminar until we’d set up the successor program, which began last year and is still expand- ing. What we’ve done is to take many elements of the Senior Seminar and incorporate them into a new program called the Senior Policy Seminars. This is offering similar training to many more Senior Foreign Service officers in smaller bites, in smaller modules — usually one or two days devoted to a specific topic. For instance, I recently took a two-day course on testifying before Congress that got into the real nitty-gritty: what F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 43 “When FSI moved into this facility 12 years ago, in some ways it felt like we were rattling around. … That’s definitely not the case any longer!” — Ambassador Katherine Peterson