F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

SPEAKING OUT
Expanding Language Capacity Through Incentive Pay
BY MARK ALLEN
Every Information Resource
Management specialist I know
is pursuing information technology
industry certifications or other
types of continuing education. This
high level of motivation to expand jobrelated
skills through self-study is a direct
result of the Skills Incentive Pay
program.
I believe that lessons learned from
the success of the SIP program can be
applied to the Language Incentive Pay
program, which offers Foreign Service
employees higher earnings for proficiency
in hard languages while serving
in a hard-language country. With a few
adjustments, LIP could become a
more powerful tool for motivating employees
to raise their linguistic proficiency
through self-study.
Elevating information technology
expertise and broadening ability in
languages such as Mandarin Chinese
or Arabic are both important goals for
the Department of State and other
foreign affairs agencies. And encouraging
employees to improve their skill
sets through self-study without having
to take them out of the work force for
long-term training is even more beneficial.
During my four years of duty in
China, I have obtained both a Microsoft
Certified Systems Engineer
Certification and a 3/3 in Mandarin
Chinese through a mixture of formal
classroom and self-study. I earned my
Enabling employees
to sharpen skills
without leaving the
work force would be
a win-win.
MCSE entirely through self-study,
while my language rating reflects 44
weeks of training at the Foreign Service
Institute in Washington followed
by three years of self-study. As a result
of those efforts, I am currently receiving
both Skills Incentive Pay and
Language Incentive Pay.
Over the past four years, I have
been struck by the difference between
the motivation levels of Foreign
Service employees trying to
improve their Mandarin scores and
IRM specialists pursuing industry certifications
and continuing education.
To be blunt, the amount of information
technology self-study taking place
among IRM specialists vastly outstrips
the hard language self-study that I
have observed among any group of
State employees.
Initially, this seemed strange to me,
given the fact that language incentive
pay is significantly greater than skills
incentive pay. But when I examined
the structure of each program more
closely, the key difference between the
two became clear. While SIP encourages
self-study, LIP does not. In fact,
in some ways the LIP program discourages
individual pursuit of fluency.
LIP and SIP Compared
Here are some key structural differences
between the two programs.
Reasonable Goals: While SIP rewards
are less lucrative than those of
LIP, they are achievable in a shorter
amount of time. (One can obtain a
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
Certification in six months or less of
self-study.) LIP rewards are greater,
but only attainable after extremely
long periods of study. In general, a
new speaker of a hard foreign language
will need to spend 88 weeks of
study or around 1,800 hours of class
time to reach the current minimum
required for incentive pay, a 3/3, in
that language.
Self-Study vs. State Department-
Sponsored Training: Because SIP requirements
cannot all easily be achieved
through FSI training alone, IRM
specialists are motivated to pursue
them on their own. In contrast, for
new speakers of a hard language, LIP
rewards are almost exclusively achieved
through FSI training. It is thus rare
to find a new speaker of a difficult language
who achieves a 3/3 through a
self-directed program.
Positions Linked to Ability: 3/3 lan-
A P R I L 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13