How Many Entry-Level Intelligence (Or Intelligence-like) Analysts Will The Business Sector Need In The Next 12 Months?

Good question, right?

If you have direct knowledge of information that might help answer the question in the title or you have indirect knowledge that is relevant to the answer to the question in the title, please take 2 minutes to complete this survey.  

What do I mean by direct and indirect knowledge?

Direct knowledge means that you know personally or have good information concerning the hiring plans of your agency or organization (or at least your section or division).  You might work in HR or be a manager with hiring responsibilities. 

Indirect knowledge is information that is relevant to the question that is not due to your direct responsibilities.  You might have spoken with an HR manager or have been involved in meetings where this issue was discussed. 

We are NOT looking for opinion based on purely circumstantial information.  If you are not involved in the hiring process either directly or indirectly, please DO NOT take this survey.

What do I mean by "Intelligence (or Intelligence-like)..."? 

First, I am not talking about private sector companies that support the US national security intelligence community.  Those jobs have already been covered by our National Security Jobs Report earlier this year.

Second, jobs which require the skill set of an intelligence analyst are rarely labelled as such within the business community.  You will have to use your best judgment here.  If you or your organization employs people that look at the external environment - at things that are critical to the success or failure of your business but are, in some way, outside the control of your business (competitive analysis is one such area, but so is Banking Secrecy Act compliance) - then you are looking at an "intelligence-like" position.

Why are we interested?

Every year, other disciplines announce hiring projections for the year:  "This year's hot jobs are for engineers and chimney sweeps."  That sort of thing.  Entry level intelligence analysts who are searching for a job, on the other hand, receive no such guidance.

We hope to change that.  Working with one of our hot-shot grad students, Greg Marchwinski, we put together this survey to get a better feel for the the job market for entry level analysts for the year ahead.

Once we get enough survey data, Greg will compile it and combine it with the macro-level, mostly qualitative data that we already have and put together a "jobs report" for the year ahead.  I will publish it here once we are done.

Finally, we have already completed our national security jobs report for next year and will follow this business survey with our law enforcement survey.

Thanks for your participation!

Best Companies To Work For -- For Entry-level Intelligence Analysts! (Fortune.com And Original Research)

Every year, Fortune Magazine posts a list of the 100 best companies to work for in the US. This is a very good list but it doesn't quite answer the question my students ask: "What is the best company to work for as an intel analyst?"

Thanks to one of our superb grad students, Nimalan Paul, we now have an answer!

Nimalan started with Fortune's list and made the initial assumption that, out of the 1000's of companies in the US, if you made the list at all you must be a pretty good place to work (Note: Nimalan used the list from 2006 as it was already available as a spreadsheet.  The vast majority of the companies from 2006 are still on the list today and since rank on the Fortune list did not matter in Nimalan's analysis, using the 2006 list seems acceptable).

From there, he thought long and hard about the criteria that would indicate that a company was good for entry level intel analysts.  He settled on  six factors:

• How many intel analyst (or intel analyst equivalent) slots are currently open?
• How many intel analysts appear to be employed by the company?
• At what level are the analysts employed?
• Is there a separate role for intel analysts within the company?
• Is there an internship program for intel analysts?
• Is there an executive level (C-level) position within the company responsible for intelligence?

He looked high and low for information on these six factors and compiled everything he found into the list you see below.  You can click on the second worksheet for his raw observations but he took it another step and actually scored each of the companies based on what he saw (you can see his scoring in the first or currently viewable worksheet).

The scoring is a bit subjective, of course (such that Nimalan indicated to me that the percentage scores are probably best interpreted as + or - 15% or so.  In other words, there is a real difference between a 60% and a 90% but probably not much actual difference between a 90% and a 95%).

Likewise, Nimalan was looking at companies that have intel positions in business exclusively.  He did not count contractual analyst positions provided by any of these companies to the US national security intelligence community.

Finally, we can't consider the list definitive.  Nimalan's ability to gather info on the companies was limited by time and access and we both acknowledge that there are likely some great places for analysts to work that didn't make it to Fortune's list.  If you know of any (and particularly if they are currently hiring...), please leave a note in the comments!