In 2023, I met my goal of writing fewer words more often. I published 40 posts, several on Foreign Service-related topics. I wrote a series on bidding for and receiving my fifth assignment. I expanded a popular post about FS Housing into a series. I also wrote two new installments of ‘Your Questions Answered.’ In what turned out to be a very road trip and family-oriented year, I made four trips to the west coast and back – three by car – and my mom and dad each visited us on the east coast. In 2022, I’d received a promotion, meaning I wouldn’t be eligible to be promoted again for two years; I enjoyed the professional sweet spot where I didn’t have to PCS, learn a new job, or compete for promotion. The year ended on a sad note: my family faced the death of my stepmother and learned the hard way about the limitations of the Medicare-funded hospice program in the United States.
Tag: SIP
Fifth Tour Bidding: Postscript, Paneling and Beyond
In my growing file of Foreign Service-related “All’s well that ends well” scenarios, I had no sooner hit the publish button on my previous post about waiting to be paneled into the job for which I received my SIP handshake in July before the Department notified me my paneling had been completed.
And thus my fifth tour bidding experience came to a close – all before the regular bid season even starts in September.
Fifth Tour Bidding: What Comes After a Handshake?
As a result of my Special Incentive Post (SIP) bidding efforts, on July 5 I was offered (and accepted) a handshake on our next diplomatic assignment to U.S. Embassy Rangoon in Burma.
However, I reserved a little corner of my mind for disappointment. After a handshake, a number of administrative things would still have to fall into place before the job would feel safely “mine.” Now more than one month later, we are getting very close to that point.
Flag Day Announcement… V
On July 5, handshake day dawned as I was having a somewhat frantic morning. Between juggling the end of my 24-hour Overseas Citizen Services duty officer shift and the requisite duty report, acting for my boss, dealing with the lack of wifi connectivity in our house, and fretting over my damaged car out in the driveway with a fallen tree limb laying next to it, I was distracted. I was aware a bidder handshake could hit my phone anytime, and that at least one post had short-listed me. However, I was slightly more focused on trying to get out the door to work in DC and be responsive to emails about a duty issue that had caught the attention of our front office.
And then, somewhere between trying to curl my hair and looking too hard at my eyebrows in the mirror, I glanced down at my iPhone balanced on the edge of the pedestal sink and saw the offer pop up.
Fifth Tour Bidding: Before Handshake Day
The day bureaus are permitted to start extending assignment offers to successful bidders on the Special Incentive Post (SIP) bid cycle is called handshake day. In the lead-up to SIP handshake day, my life was a little chaotic. So much so, in fact, I almost lost track of the fact handshake day was coming. It’s not that I actually forgot about it; I was certainly aware. But I wasn’t exactly twiddling my thumbs and waiting for it to arrive, either.
Fifth Tour Bidding: Bids Are In
The summer 2024 early assignments bid cycle is drawing to a close, with Special Incentive Post (SIP) bids due today and domestic Long-Term Training and Development (LTTD) bids due right after the holiday weekend.
My statements of interest are in. Lobbying, consultations, and interviews all completed. I’ve entered less than half a dozen bids into all the right platforms and rank-ordered them, and I’ve drafted thank you notes for references and interviewers. There’s no action for me other than to see what happens, and that feels pretty good. We’ve now arrived at my favorite part of the bidding season: the part where I don’t need to do any more work, and am free to anticipate the possibility of any of my bids materializing into a handshake.
Fifth Tour Bidding: The Early Assignments Cycle
As I mentioned in my previous post previewing bidding strategies for my upcoming fifth tour, the regular bid season won’t officially get underway until early autumn. But there are some aspects of bidding that start sooner – besides anxiety, networking, and planning – that I didn’t mention. Two of those aspects make up what we call the “early assignments cycle.”
I’m referring to Special Incentive Post (SIP) bidding and Long-Term Training and Detail (LTTD) bidding. The SIP and LTTD bid cycles are abbreviated, occurring before the regular bid cycle so the Department can quickly lock in handshakes for jobs at its highest-priority or most difficult-to-staff posts, as well as external detail and academic positions, respectively, a few months before regular bidding begins. If you receive an SIP or LTTD assignment, your bidding is done and you can watch everyone else sweat it out!
I don’t have a lot of experience with either SIPs or LTTDs. I tried to bid SIP posts from Australia during third tour bidding in 2018, but as an untenured second tour officer bidding mid-level for the first time, the experience was so unsuccessful and short-lived I don’t think I even mentioned it on the blog. And last time I bid in 2021 I didn’t really understand what LTTDs were; most of them were offered above my rank at that time. Finding out about how LTTDs work now has been a little like discovering a hidden level of a video game I thought I’d already scoped out and understood.
This time around I plan to throw my hat in the ring for both SIP and LTTD jobs. This isn’t because I don’t want any jobs in the regular bid cycle – much to the contrary, I have my eye seriously on at least a dozen of the projected vacancies! I just want to try something new and see what happens. I’ve learned a long time ago in the Foreign Service not to self-adjudicate out of opportunities. Maybe SIP or LTTD will work out and maybe they won’t, but in the meantime, here are some of my unofficial, bidder perspectives on the process. A note that none of the information in this post is intended to constitute instructions or policy.
Collecting Postcards 