1st Annual Entry-level Intel Analyst Jobs Report Out Now!

How good is the job market for entry-level intelligence analysts over the next 12 months? 

Good question, right?  If you are a recent graduate from college or you are graduating in 2012, and you are interested in working as an analyst in the US national security intelligence community, it is probably one of the questions you are asking yourself.

The answer is contained in this document.

We tasked one of our outstanding grad students, Whitney Bergendahl, with examining this question back in the early fall.  He put together a survey (which some of you may remember) and conducted some fairly extensive secondary research to put together this report.  It is obviously a tough nut to crack but Whitney has done yeoman's work on this first ever, job market report for entry-level intel analysts.

Whitney and I are both interested in your feedback, of course.  After you have had a chance to read the report, please leave a comment!

But wait, there's more!

(I know that sounds cheesy but there is, in fact, more...)

This report only covers the job market for entry-level analysts in the national security intelligence community.  Between now and the end of February, we hope to publish two other reports on the job markets for entry-level law enforcement intellience analysts and for entry level intelligence analysts in the business community. 

But wait!  There's even more!

(Had to do it...)

Benjamin Wittorf, who publishes occasionally on the blog, Netzwerk-Organisatorische Formen, but is probably best followed via Twitter and makes a living as a researcher for eVenture Capital Partners, has turned my series of blog posts, How To Get A Job In Intelligence, into an epub for easy (and free!) download. (Note:  I am sure there is something clever I could say here about "the kindness of strangers" but I can't think of it so I will just say, Thanks, Ben!)

While this series is a little old, I think much of the general guidance ought to still be good.  If you want to read it, you will, of course, need to have an epub reader to access it.  If you don't, there is also a pdf version or, of course, you can still access the original series on this blog.

If You Think You Understand The Role Of Social Media In The Arab Spring Uprisings (And Particularly If You Don't), Watch This Video...

 

This video is an hour long and, frankly, I didn't think I would have the time this morning.  Started watching nonetheless and became riveted by one of the most cogent explanations of the role of social media in activism I have heard.  Even if you disagree (and this is not my area of expertise so I hope those that do disagree will do so in the comments so we can all learn), it is well worth the hour it takes to watch.

(Many thanks to my friends at Sharp for this!)

Testing A New Mindmapping Tool...And You Can Join In! (Popplet.com)

One of our amazing alums (Thanks, Justin!) sent me a link to a beta version of a new, web-based, collaborative mindmapping tool called Popplet.

I have been playing  around with it for the last half hour or so and found it easy to use and potentially very useful.

What I don't know is how well it works as a collaborative tool (which is where my real interest lies -- there is plenty of good stand-alone mindmapping software), so I thought I would throw it out there for anyone to examine (Popplet makes this simple with an embed code.  Yeah!). 

If you are interested in trying it out, however, you will need to drop me an email (kwheaton at Mercyhurst dot edu) and I will send you an invite.

These kinds of open, collaborative tools that are easy to set up and quick to learn are great for classroom exercises; they are interactive and engaging.  In my experience, students love them (If you are looking for another example, try Willyou.typewith.me)

It is also a great way to build a mental model of an intelligence problem. This app is in beta though and has no way (that I could find) to safely share or export the data. There is an offline reader application called Popplet Presenter which would allow a single individual to show his/her work securely (-ish) to others, I suppose.

I suspect these features are coming (offering these features for a modest price is the way most of these kinds of apps, like Mindmeister or Webspiration, make their money) but until then, this is probably best confined to the classroom.

Welcome USA Today Readers!

If you have found your way to my little slice of the internet today, it is probably because of this article in USA Today. 

Hello!

If you are interested in learning more about my use of games in my intelligence studies classes, you will probably want to read my online article, Teaching Strategic Intelligence Through Games.

If you are interested in a specific example of a game and how I used it in class, you will probably find this article, Spot Report From The Future, to be worth reading.  If you want all of the games-related posts, just search for "games" in the search bar at the top left of this page.

If you are interested in where I teach, you can find out more at the Mercyhurst website.  If you are interested in the intelligence studies program at Mercyhurst, you can find out more about it on the Mercyhurst College Institute For Intelligence Studies website.

If you want to look at some of my other research or observations, just poke around this site.  I post updates concerning most of the things I am working on here as well as some links to various projects on which my students have worked.  Finally, if you have a question for me, please post a comment or drop me an email directly at kwheaton at mercyhurst dot edu.

Thanks for stopping by!  You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this site directly at the link on the bottom right or through your RSS feed reader.  If you use Twitter, you can follow all my postings @kwheaton.

Evaluating The Reliability Of Social Media Sources, An Amazing Technology Roadmap And Reagan's Visual SFARs (Link List)

I love having friends and alumni that send me interesting links and this week contained an extraordinary crop!  Here are three of the best things that happened to cross my desktop:

Some of the Ushahidi Deployments

How To Verify Social Media Content.  We have known for some time how to evaluate online sources for credibility in a general sense (See Dax Norman's thesis and checklist here.  Not only it is a brilliant piece of research, it is also the only such document designed by an intelligence analyst for use by other intelligence analysts).  When it comes to understanding how to evaluate social media sources, however, the question becomes much trickier.

Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and previously co-directed Harvard's Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning (If you are not familiar with the crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, stop now and go here).  He has had extensive real-world experience with social media sources in the hundreds of uses of the Ushahidi platform in crises world-wide and he has translated that experience into an outstanding list of hints and tips for evaluating social media (Twitter specifcially).

While his insights into evaluating social media are born of this experience rather than more rigorous statistical analyses (like Dax's), his findings ring true and certainly operate as an excellent general purpose checklist until the science catches up. 

http://envisioningtech.com/

Envisioning Emerging Technology For 2012 And Beyond.  Through a series of serendipitous accidents, I have worked on a number of projects looking at technology trends. 

While I normally start with Gartner on these types of questions, I have just added Michael Zappa and his excellent work at Envisioning Technology to my short list of go-to sources.

The technology roadmap he has built is awesome (you can see the compact version to the right but I strongly recommend you take a look at the interactive version here (Note to Michael Zappa:  If you are going to make it Creative Commons, you might as well make it embeddable as well...Please!)).

Ronald Reagan: Intelligence and the End of the Cold War.  Finally, I like to emphasize the importance of production skills for my students with a variety of stories about high-level decisionmakers who preferred their intelligence in "alternative" formats.

For example, John F. Kennedy had the President's Intelligence Checklist (the PICL -- analysts who worked on the product were said to work in the "PICL Factory").  Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, liked to see some of his intelligence, at least, in the form of short videos.

(Note:  One of the kinds of analytic report writing we teach at Mercyhurst is called, generically, the Short Form Analytic Report, usually pronounced "Ess-Far".  When this type of report contains more visual elements than written ones, we call it a visual SFAR, hence the title to this post).

Many have speculated that this was because Reagan was an actor and naturally gravitated to film but, whatever the reason, it is an interesting lesson in the importance of producing intelligence -- that is, the ability to fully communicate the results of analysis to the decisionmaker that the intel unit is supporting.

You can see the full report here or watch the videos on the CIA's YouTube channel (!).   I have embedded my favorite (because I lived through it...) below: