A little over a week ago concluded the annual exercise all Foreign Service employees get to partake in, the Employee Evaluation Reports (aka EERs). I wrote about it last year here, but the just of it is you get to write a narrative of all your great accomplishments over the preceding year known as a “rating period”, and then two senior level individuals above you get to chime in and write their own narrative about how good of an employee they think you are too.

These evaluations are essentially the life blood of the Foreign Service tenure and promotion system. You could be the best medical provider or political officer in the world. Saving lives or prevent a coup, but if you are bad at articulating how great your work was, or even worse, if your bosses stink at it, it can and will impact the rest of your career.

A lot of emotions come to mind when I think of the whole process. For one, it makes me nervous, especially as I am still a year away from being evaluated for tenure, and the EER’s written here are what determines whether or not I get tenured. Getting tenure is really the most important goal I have at this point, and even outside of promotions, it pretty much means I get to stick around and enjoy the journey. It’s pretty common for it to take a couple of years after eligibility to get tenure, but I would obviously prefer tenure sooner rather than later.

Second, EER’s are how promotions are determined. Panels of people read all your evaluations, decide whether you should be promoted, mid ranked, or low ranked, and then numerically rank the promoted pile. This is what HR uses to determine who gets promoted every year. While for me not as important as tenure, promotions come with more money, and who doesn’t like that?

So clearly the EER is a big deal, but another thing that comes to mind is the absurdity of what boils down to a creative writing contest that can make or break a career. The reality as I have mentioned in the past, it is hard to NOT get tenured, over 90% of FS employees get it and for MED its nearly the entire pool, but until it happens, it’s something to think about. Stories abound in the service of folks that are bad or mediocre employees getting through the ranks solely because they are good writers. It’s also tough for managers to review their employees poorly because a lot of red tape comes with these evaluations, and pretty much everything can be grieved by employees. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as employee protections are important, but it means a lot of managers would rather just write lukewarm evaluations versus the extra work of writing what they really think.

I say all this but ultimately have walked away these last two years with good feelings about my EERs. I enjoy writing, which is why I continue what I am doing here. I also am fortunate to have had a series of bosses that I have gotten along with, they like my work, and they write well. The new reviewing cycle I just entered last week will be key as it will be my 3rd EER I receive in the Foreign Service, will be my first look at tenure, and will also be the first look at promotion. Although promotion on your first look is very rare, tenure on your first look isn’t, so I am keeping my fingers crossed that in late 2025, I get to see my name on the tenure cable. Fingers crossed! -Nick