Good luck with implementing a curriculum for foreign policy expertise. That's a worthwhile goal.
Looking at the "average" careerist at the State Department, what is that person's background?
How long has the average careerist been at the State Department?
How long does that person stay?
Do most "average" careerist's performance congregate around the "average" point? Or is there a bimodal distribution of low performers and high performers? Or is there an even distribution, or some other distribution?
What do high performing careerist at the State Department look like/do? What about low performers?
Roger -- sorry for the late reply. I didn't see your comment until just now.
You're asking questions I would LOVE for the HR department to be studying. But a big part of the problem here is that we have no way to judge the performance of State Department employees because there's no shared conception of expertise, and no evaluation of performance.
Would the HR department be open to developing what could constitute a shared concept of expertise (it could be very broad) and begin evaluating performance initially not for raises or advancement but to understand what qualities influence performance?
Could AI be used to look at reports retrospectively and compare to known outcomes to come up with a concept of what constitutes expertise?
I'm not sure how amenable the HR folks would be to challenging their existing assumptions about expertise. Here's a recent article I read that discusses some of these efforts within the hiring space. https://afsa.org/modernizing-foreign-service-assessments-move-virtual-platforms I'd like to write more on these hiring topics sometime, but perhaps you'll see the ways the existing system is flawed.
I think your instinct on how to improve the concept of expertise is exactly right. If it's not based upon outcomes, it's probably not very useful. Certainly AI could be part of the solution, but it's a big, complicated question. I don't think there's going to be any easy answers or shortcuts. Nor should there be!
Good luck with implementing a curriculum for foreign policy expertise. That's a worthwhile goal.
Looking at the "average" careerist at the State Department, what is that person's background?
How long has the average careerist been at the State Department?
How long does that person stay?
Do most "average" careerist's performance congregate around the "average" point? Or is there a bimodal distribution of low performers and high performers? Or is there an even distribution, or some other distribution?
What do high performing careerist at the State Department look like/do? What about low performers?
Roger -- sorry for the late reply. I didn't see your comment until just now.
You're asking questions I would LOVE for the HR department to be studying. But a big part of the problem here is that we have no way to judge the performance of State Department employees because there's no shared conception of expertise, and no evaluation of performance.
Would the HR department be open to developing what could constitute a shared concept of expertise (it could be very broad) and begin evaluating performance initially not for raises or advancement but to understand what qualities influence performance?
Could AI be used to look at reports retrospectively and compare to known outcomes to come up with a concept of what constitutes expertise?
I'm not sure how amenable the HR folks would be to challenging their existing assumptions about expertise. Here's a recent article I read that discusses some of these efforts within the hiring space. https://afsa.org/modernizing-foreign-service-assessments-move-virtual-platforms I'd like to write more on these hiring topics sometime, but perhaps you'll see the ways the existing system is flawed.
I think your instinct on how to improve the concept of expertise is exactly right. If it's not based upon outcomes, it's probably not very useful. Certainly AI could be part of the solution, but it's a big, complicated question. I don't think there's going to be any easy answers or shortcuts. Nor should there be!