life as an Intelligence analyst / day-to-day, growth, career advice!

what is up guys my name is kiana if you're new here i graduated college from southern methodist university in may 2020 uh with majors in international studies and philosophy and that same month in may of 2020 i also got a job as a geopolitical intelligence analyst um today's video is basically going to be me telling you like what life as a private sector geopolitical intelligence analyst is like because when i was doing my research there was just not enough information out there on the internet about private sector intel and i just thought i could add some valuable insight here so um the video is going to be broken down into three parts it's going to be kind of my day-to-day what my like growth trajectory has kind of looked like and then the third portion will be my advice to those of you who are considering getting involved in private sector intelligence uh so let's get into it so the first portion of this video is going to be kind of my day-to-day life so the bottom line is that each day and each week is very different but it can basically be broken down into two kind of range of products that kind of shape the way our weeks pan out so the first part of products are those that are regularly scheduled and regularly produced my team personally has two kind of set products that we produce and one is a weekly product and the other is a monthly product and those are kind of our regular schedule that we can know that okay every like wednesday and thursday i'm gonna be working on that and then the second portion is kind of stuff that is ad hoc it just comes in as the week gets going and different teams will come in requesting information from us um and so that kind of entails like customer requests so responding to their emails or writing a whole strategic white paper for them or initiating a strategic white paper on our own as well as doing data entry so that's kind of the day-to-day week-to-week scenario it's a lot of writing reading news reading being customer oriented um and working pretty fast the second portion of this video that i wanted to talk about um is opportunities for growth one thing i wish i knew more of prior to interviewing and prior to even like saying yes to this job is kind of what opportunities await me like three months down the line six months down the line a year down line two years down the line what do i have to look forward to essentially and so because i've only been in this role for about eight months now i can only speak to three months and six month increments of work that i've done so that's what i'm gonna do here today i'm looking at my laptop but basically within three months i had written numerous white papers to inform client decisions i had created a data visualization product that was going to go out to executive customers contributed to a weekly product i got to train some teammates on our daily functionings and operations as a team um i gave numerous verbal briefings to clients which was awesome i peer edited papers and helped create modify and populate an entire data set that customers would be using regularly and then within six months i basically had done everything that i just mentioned in the three months and then i also got to collaborate with teammates to create a new product which is really exciting for me and a cool new leadership opportunity i also got to engage with leadership more just through doing projects that i just mentioned and then i also um got to modify our existing weekly product and produce more proactive strategic white papers so these could be anything from like just it could just be anything that i was really interested in and saw was increasingly trendy in the geopolitical sphere something that i was monitoring closely and found you know this might impact customers and they don't even know it yet so the third part of this video and the last part of this video is my advice to those of you who are considering going into the private sector intelligence community just because that's what i can speak to the most this job requires a lot of reading writing and keeping up with the 24-hour news cycle uh so just make sure you can keep up with all of that um we have like a two-week turnover rate on papers um a short period of time for editing for multiple rounds of editing actually um and then yeah just making sure you can keep up with that i would say the hardest part about it all is keeping up with the news cycle um it can get pretty emotionally exhausting if you're anything like me and that stuff kind of takes a toll on you it's really beneficial that those of you who are considering a career path intelligence are aware that self-care is very important in this industry and taking time to do things that you really enjoy is also very important for your mental sanity and your productivity at work so two the job requires team players it's great if you can work independently but sometimes you're gonna be working on collaborative papers a lot of times you're gonna be brainstorming with this team to create new ideas and concepts and cutting edge stuff so you want to make sure that you are a team player you can carry your weight if a teammate is struggling one day you have to make sure that you can help pick up the slack on that front so that there are no hiccups in your production timeline yeah and also just again going back to the first piece of advice this job is very fast-paced so if you're close with your team and you're able to kind of be a team player um and share in that collective difficulty that is even better my third piece of advice is that this job third and last piece of advice is that this job requires a lot a lot of public speaking um probably more than most entry-level analyst jobs require um and so personally i was not good at public speaking before i started this job and actually i got super super nervous and i still do sometimes public speaking um yeah but especially in college i would get super nervous but um i've kind of come to adopt that it's it's hard but you kind of get used to it and if you make an effort to learn it can kind of be a fun experience and a really rewarding experience when you kind of nail a really great brief where you were talking about really complex topics um to like ordinary people who may not understand like the full scope of the issue or whatever but then they finally get it and they're like okay like we'll make a decision based off of that that's great thank you for telling us all this stuff um and then even more so when you have like questions thrown at you and you're able to answer them so if you're not great at public speaking i wouldn't say that this is like a reason to not go after a job and geopolitical intelligence it definitely is hard um but it but it's also something you can get over and work on um if you're just willing to put in that work so yeah that's kind of all that i have here for you guys today um i hope you enjoyed this video and if you did give it a thumbs up subscribe leave a comment of any videos that you think um i should make next or you would like to see for me either related to this or totally unrelated to this i have always loved youtube i think i've been here for like i've been watching youtube for so long and i finally decided why don't i just make a channel and like well no i've always had a channel why don't i just make videos um here i am doing it i hope you guys enjoyed and i will see you guys soon bye

Channel: chianna

Views: 3,214

Rating: 4.9016395 out of 5

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Id: DAe_KPN1L5k

Length: 7min 59sec (479 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021