Second Tour Bidding

Second tour bidding is a bit more complicated than first tour bidding. Instead of approximately the same number of jobs on the bid list as the number of members of the officer's A-100 class, there are several hundred jobs on your bid list, and it is your responsibility to read all of the rules your CDO (Career Development Officer) emails to you and try to find 30 bids that match these qualifications to fill out your list. Below is a summary of the rules that most affected DH.

Time in Training: Because of the World Cup being held in Brazil right about the time we were supposed to arrive, we were delayed getting to post until after it was over. What we didn't realize until the bidding instructions came out was that this made it nearly impossible for DH to bid on jobs with language training this time around. There is a maximum amount of "Time in Training" for a Junior Officer before it starts to mess with being tenured within the allowed time (FSO's have an "up or out" policy), so DH was only allowed two bids on his list that went over Time in Training. The likelihood that a CDO would give him one of these bids was extremely low. Also, there were very few bids on the list that DH would consider awesome enough to jeopardize his ability to tenure. In short, DH had to bid either English-speaking or Portuguese-speaking jobs, other than two jobs.

Get out of the Country: Say goodbye to most of the Portuguese-speaking jobs, because you can't serve in the same country you are currently in.

Consular/In Cone Bids: DH did his in-cone assignment this time around, so he had to focus on making sure all of his bids had at least one year of Consular duties in them. There were very few qualifying bids on his list that were not Consular, so this was not difficult. There were a few rotations, but most of them had language training or had bad timing.

Differential: Because we were at a low differential post this time (read: not terribly different lifestyle than in the U.S., not very dangerous, either), DH would be able to look over the whole list, but wouldn't get to bid on it until everyone with high differentials had received their assignments from it. So, we got to research everything, make a preliminary list, then watch posts get removed from the list and try to come up with different bids. Or so we thought. (More on that later.) Also, because of our low differential this time, 20 of our 30 bids had to have a 15% or higher differential. Not terribly difficult to do with this bid list.

ETA: There is an extraordinary amount of math to be done when working on bid lists. This is because the bids all come with an arrival date, and you have to figure out how much training time you have to do between your TED (date you can leave post) and the arrival date to come up with an acceptable ETA. This ETA can wiggle by one month of the date on the bid list, creating Perfect (same month) and Imperfect (one month difference) bids. The math part comes up because of Home Leave, Position Training, Language Training, and Consultations. Home leave has to be no fewer than 20 business days, and no more than 45 business days. Position Training isn't necessarily going to start at the optimal time (except Consular, luckily, which starts a new class every Monday). Language Training is the sticky one. They start at only a few different times per year. Then, add in up to five Consultation days to fill in any gaps (and actually do some consultations), and you have your schedule. Now do this for each different language/position combination on the list. That's what I had to do over and over again until I discovered there was no way DH was going to fit in language training and stay under his Time in Training allowance. Also, there was only one non-Brazil Portuguese-speaking job on the list, and it was way later on the ETA. So, we were down to English only.

Perfect/Imperfect: You must bid at least 20 Perfect bids. Yeah, right. After removing from the list anything that was absolutely impossible for DH to do because of the ETA, Time in Training, and Consular requirements, we came up with exactly 32 possible bids. However, there were fewer than 20 that were Perfect bids. By the time DH was allowed to submit his bid list, there were only 24 possible bids left on the list, and only 13 were Perfect. Among the Imperfects were two that went beyond Time in Training, just to add some things to the list. The CDO had a timely vacation during the final week of bidding, so the question of "what to do now" was never answered. DH submitted the bid list as it was, and I guess that was the right thing to do, because we got our #1 bid.

Rank Order List: Unlike the A-100 "high, mid, low" ranking system, this list gets rank ordered from 1-30. They also had the officer list reasons for why they put the job on the list, and explain the math that gets them there by their ETA. About half of DH's list said that the schools looked good, about 8-10 said he had some interest in that country, and the rest that didn't say either of those basically said that there was low interest in the jobs or the schools weren't accredited, so we'd rather not, thank you! Most of the time, jobs where you really don't want to go don't go on the list, so we were a little worried about their presence on the list at all, but not too much. We had heard that normally, people get a job in their top 5. 

The Results: We heard back in about two weeks from submitting the list. In case you didn't get the importance of the flag at the top of the screen, we are going to India (specifically, Chennai), in September of 2016, where DH will be a Consular Officer. Luckily, India was a place DH wanted to go, anyway, and would have been on the list, even if the list hadn't been decimated by his Time in Training restrictions. I have always been fascinated by books I read about India, so it wasn't hard for me to get on board. DH probably would have chosen a language-designated position in India over English-speaking, though. Why Chennai over New Delhi or Mumbai? Mainly because of its better air quality, the timing of arrival, and something about it just felt right. I'm happy that we will be getting to our next post without transferring schools twice, even though the kids will be getting there about 6 weeks after school starts. I'm sure I'll be dedicating a post to that issue sometime in the future!