Spring brings about a favorite time of every employee in the Foreign Service, their annual evaluation reports.
The Employee Evaluation Report (EER) carries a lot of weight. Not just because it matters for promotions and assignments, but because of what it has traditionally required: time, careful phrasing, and more than a little second-guessing. Drafting accomplishment statements could feel like its own side project, one where the challenge wasn’t just what you did, but how well you could write about it.
Over time, that dynamic created a familiar tension. The EER is supposed to reflect performance, but the process sometimes felt like it rewarded polish as much as substance. People traded drafts, word-smithed bullets, and tried to strike that elusive balance between confidence and restraint, all while still doing their actual jobs. The allowed introduction of AI into writing, added more chaos into the mix, and it started to feel like a battle between AI on who could toot their own horn the best.
Lately, though, there’s been a noticeable shift, and the current administration has completely redone the EER form to prize more objectivity and less creative writing.
In practical terms, that means employees are spending less time crafting extensive write-ups, and supervisors are taking on a more central role in articulating performance. The expectation is simpler: clearer, more direct commentary that focuses on impact rather than composition. The amount of allowable writing space has been chopped in all sections significantly.
Instead of asking every officer to become a careful editor of their own accomplishments, the system is shifting toward a more straightforward question: What did this person do, and how well did they do it? Then assigning a numeric score on a scale of 1-5, with a very clear emphasis that the overwhelming majority should be a 3.
It also places a bit more responsibility where it arguably belongs. Raters and reviewers, those with the closest view of someone’s work, are now more clearly tasked with telling that story. When done well, that kind of perspective is more grounded, more comparative, and ultimately more useful to promotion boards trying to make decisions across a large and diverse workforce. For MED folks it’s still sort of muddy since we are supervised by non medical management officers in most of our overseas assignments, so there remains a technical gap, but overall I am hopeful the new system will be an improvement.
For most people, the change won’t eliminate the EER’s importance or the need to think carefully about how your work is presented. But it does take some of the pressure off the idea that every sentence needs to be perfectly engineered.
In a system where time is always in short supply, that’s not a small thing.
The EER will always be a central part of a Foreign Service career. But this shift, toward clarity, brevity, and supervisor-driven evaluation, feels like a step toward making it a more accurate reflection of the work itself, rather than the writing around it. I guess we shall see come promotion board time. I am still probably a couple of years away from being promoted, but every year matters. Here’s to some good luck. -Nick
