“A 55-year-old garbage man is a million times smarter than a 28-year-old with three PhD’s. Especially smarter than him, because this idiot has been thinking about three things for like 15 years.” -Comedian Louis C.K. during his Oh My God special in 2013.
Packed into a secure government auditorium is a sea of excited yet nervous men and women in black, blue, or grey suits with at least one shared trait: A tested passion for making a constructive impact on the world by fulfilling the mission of a particular government agency. This life dedication was not easy to achieve. The application process alone usually takes a few years, and most don’t make it on the first try. The majority of the room has already finished graduate school, and some have very specialized experience. Yet the percentage of all applicants who get to walk through the doors during Week 1 can be counted on one hand. That level of success and the accompanying positive energy is the glue keeping this huge group together.
A sizeable portion is from my workgroup and will soon transfer to our own specialized training together. But for now we are intentionally split up among the others in typical team-building fashion. The rest of the room are from completely different occupational tracts and varying levels of life experience. There are some truly gifted and intelligent people present, collectively speaking dozens of languages and having already lived in numerous countries. However, the term book smart comes to mind, as there is a noticeable lack of soft skills and workplace experience (the very traits some positions were hired for, but many others were not) on the part of those whose life exposure has thus far been limited to academia. Their knowledge base, politics, even their personal values are mostly confined to what has been taught to them by others. Simple tasks such as briefing colleagues in a business meeting or drafting a professional email are unfamiliar and arduous to someone having previously lived their life one 280-character Tweet or 5,000-word research paper at a time. They lack even a conceptual understanding of typical workplace concepts like chain of command or merit pay (the generation of “everyone wins a trophy”).
The result is a surging of frustration along with a waning of patience for those of us having already surmounted such a learning curve during a previous career. We have our own faults, to be sure, particularly in terms of the gruff and blunt way we voice our jaded views of the real world. Fortunately, the onboarding process capitalizes on this dichotomy by allowing leaders in the group to assume guidance roles for the novice members practicing their interpersonal and organizational skills while the instructors moderate bilateral feedback to help both sides improve.
We also explore the history, structure, and purpose of our organization through workshops and group exercises. This fosters teamwork and lets us practice public speaking. We are introduced to the plethora of resources available to help us prepare for, and successfully navigate through, a life of worldwide travel. The culmination is a large simulation designed to mirror the real-world environments we will soon be exposed to. But the real day, the day everyone is waiting for, is the day we get our first assignment.
The Dark Passport 