Want To Work For CIA? NSA? DIA? Don't Use USAJobs! (+ What To Do Instead!)

(My undergrad research assistant, McKenzie Rowland, and I are in the process of updating a series of posts I did back in 2009 called "How To Get A Job In Intelligence".  As part of her research, she took a detailed look at the career websites of all of the US national security intelligence organizations.  Her very useful analysis and comments are below.)

By:
McKenzie Rowland

When searching for a job in intelligence, one of the first places many people look is USAJobs.gov.  This site lists many postings for a number of agencies and features an advanced job search tool that allows you to filter and refine results.

While USAJobs makes the search process much more straightforward, it should not be the be-all and end-all for job hunting within intelligence agencies.  There are plenty of other alternative search engines and sites to consider, such as agency websites, when searching for intelligence-related careers, many of which yield more favorable results.

The matrix below displays yesterday's search results for the word “analyst” on both the websites of members of the Intelligence Community and the USAJobs section for that intelligence organization (Note: These search results are not indicative of the complete availability of jobs for either the organizations listed or for USAJobs. Furthermore, results may change over time.).

Category 1 Sites

For the following intelligence organizations, it is most beneficial to visit their respective website as opposed to USAJobs.  Note: some positions on these sites may overlap with ones already listed on USAJobs.

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA): While the DIA’s general job postings do overlap to an extent with USAJobs, the DIA Jobs site lists several positions that USAJobs does not.  DIA’s job site also gives very detailed information for each individual posting, such as the “job family,” which allows you to quickly sort through positions relevant to you.

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA): For the NGA, it is more advantageous to search for open positions on their website.  Similar to the DIA, many of the jobs listed here are not available on USAJobs, so it is important to visit NGA’s career page to avoid missing out on potentially relevant job postings.

National Security Agency (NSA): For the NSA, you are almost certainly better off searching for jobs through this agency’s job site, as USAJobs does not list any positions for this agency.

Category 2 Sites

For the following agencies and departments, there is some benefit to visiting their respective websites for career information, but USAJobs provides the most in terms of actual search results.  For some of these, searches can only be conducted through USAJobs, or the websites will include that organization’s section within USAJobs.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI): The ODNI lists job vacancies directly on their page, but applicants are redirected to USAJobs for the majority of available positions.  (Investigative Analysis is an exception here, as you can only apply for this job through ODNI’s recruitment office.)  USAJobs does, however, list a couple of analyst positions that the ODNI’s job site does not.

Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence: When you search and apply for a job on DOE’s site, you’re almost immediately redirected to USAJobs.  While the DOE has a job searching page with detailed descriptions of each position, I’ve found that you are actually better off searching USAJobs for open positions.  Upon searching for “analyst” on DOE’s site, I discovered that many of the analyst jobs were already filled, and that USAJobs seems to filter these available positions better than DOE. For more information on the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, you can visit their website here.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Intelligence and Analysis: When searching within the DHS main site for jobs, it redirects you to their section on the USAJobs site, dhs.usajobs.gov. You do, however, have the ability to narrow down your search by skill, component, or location on DHS’ site before you are redirected to USAJobs.  For more information on the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, you can visit their website here.

Department of State (DOS), Intelligence and Research: While the DOS career page offers information about positions such as foreign and civil service officers, all actual job searches must be conducted through USAJobs.  For more information on the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, you can visit their website here.

Department of Treasury (DOT), Office of Intelligence and Analysis: For the DOT, all job searches are redirected to the USAJobs section for DOT, treasury.usajobs.gov. The site does, however, give links to the career pages of the 10 bureaus and services under the DOT.  For more information on the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, you can visit their website here.

Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA): For the DEA, all job searches and applications must be conducted through USAJobs at dea.usajobs.gov. If you’re having any trouble setting up your USAJobs account or have questions regarding careers with the DEA, this career page includes ample support and information on the application process.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI):  The FBI website is useful if you’d like to learn more about careers within the FBI before you apply, and also contains a link to a page specifically for interns and college students. When applying for a job on their page, however, FBI Jobs redirects you the Bureau’s USAJobs section, fbi.usajobs.gov, which solely displays results for postings from the FBI. This is particularly convenient for when you actually want to search for a specific position within the FBI instead of just finding information about it, as FBI.gov does not have a search engine tool of its own.

U.S. Air Force (USAF), Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance: Currently, there are no actual applications available on the Air Force’s site, but their career page does provide useful information on different jobs and duties within the Air Force. In this case, it is most beneficial to search USAJobs for openings. For more information on Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, you can visit their website here.

U.S. Army, Army Military Intelligence: The Army’s Career Management page is designed for both enlisted and civilian individuals searching for a job in the Army. Civilian career opportunities are posted on USAJobs, which you can search for using armycivilianservice.usajobs.gov. For more information on Army Military Intelligence, you can visit their website here.

U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), Coast Guard Intelligence: For reserve and enlisted careers within the Coast Guard, you can search within the site for recruiters and available positions near you.  When applying for civilian careers, however, the site redirects you to a page on USAJobs of results for the Coast Guard. But before applying for actual positions, you may want to take a look at the Coast Guard’s career page that gives descriptions of all job types. For more information on Coast Guard Intelligence, you can visit their website here.

U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), Marine Corps Intelligence Activity: Similar to the Army’s career page, civilian positions are not listed directly on the Marine Corps’ site, and USAJobs provides the most filtered search results for specific openings. For more information on the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, you can visit their website here.

U.S. Navy, Naval Intelligence: While no job searching tool exists on the Navy’s career page and searches are conducted solely through USAJobs, the Navy’s career page provides very detailed information on the many different disciplines and career paths you can choose.  For information on the Office of Naval Intelligence, you can visit their website here.

Category 3 Sites

These intelligence organizations are neither listed on USAJobs, nor do they return actual job search results.  The only way one can apply to these agencies is through their agency website or through another agency.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): The CIA’s career site doesn’t list specific job postings and does not have any positions posted on USAJobs.  To apply for a job, you must fill out an online application through their site once you’ve found the type of job you’re interested in. You then create an account, add that job to your “job cart” (limit 4 jobs, and your account terminates within 3 days, so act fast!) and begin the application process. If you don’t really know what you’re looking for, though, the  Job Fit Tool matches you with potential career paths based on a series of questions and can provide a good starting point for searching.

National Reconnaissance Office (NRO): The NRO is an exception to the other job search tools within agency sites.  Due to the nature of this organization, the careers page only contains links to the career pages of the agencies that collectively make up the NRO; their website suggests that you take a look at those websites instead.

Last Bit Of Advice...

When first looking for a career in intelligence, it is best to begin your search on the websites of members of the Intelligence Community. These websites oftentimes provide valuable career information and allow you to broaden your search within a specific search term. However, if you’re searching for a specific discipline not within one particular agency or department, such as "domestic counterterrorism", USAJobs will retrieve such positions.

All in all, USAJobs can be highly useful for many intelligence job searches, but it shouldn’t always be used as the primary job search engine--explore your other options!  

IBM Creates Interactive Map/Infographic Of CIA World Factbook (IBM.com)

IBM, in order to demonstrate some of their latest web based technologies, has taken the data from the CIA's World Factbook and re-mixed it in the form of a stunning, interactive infographic.  

The final product allows the user to much more quickly engage and compare the data for the various countries in the world.  The screenshot to the right does not (as usual) do the product justice.  I have zoomed in on central Africa to show some of the detail but you can just as easily take a look at the whole world and can instantly get a sense of where various regions lie with respect to any of the data the World Factbook contains.  

I strongly recommend you go here to see the full product.  Play around with it; I think you will be impressed.

If you are interested in additional information about IBM's initiative, you can go to the cryptically named IBM ILOG Elixir Blog or to Information Aesthetics, where I first picked up on this product.

Note:  This has been a very good week for maps (See also here and here) ...

Part 2 -- The Intelligence Job Market From 20,000 Feet (How To Get A Job In Intelligence)

Part 1 -- Introduction

A high altitude survey of the intelligence job market yields some pretty interesting observations. The first is that the intelligence job market is finite. There are some pretty distinct boundaries and limits to the size of it and knowing these limits and boundaries helps you understand the potential for jobs in this market.

Let's start with the basics. How many intelligence jobs are there in the US and the world? How many people are actually employed in intelligence? We will start with the most famous of the job markets -- the US Intelligence Community.

Jobs In The US Intelligence Community (IC)

According to a late 2006 US News and World Report article, there are about 100,000 people working in the US intelligence community of which about 17,000 are analysts. This number was more or less confirmed in mid-2008. While it is unclear what exactly has been counted and what has not, these numbers provide a good starting place for some back of the envelope analysis useful to job seekers.

For example, how many analysts does the US IC need each year? Well, if you imagine a 25 year career for an analyst and all of them stay until retirement, then you are looking at about 700 a year (17,000/25 = 680).

It is virtually certain that only a few of these analysts stay all the way until retirement, however. More importantly, the number of analysts in each year group is not equal. In fact, one of the common comments about the intel community is that there are a number of "old" analysts soon to reach retirement and an even larger number of young analysts who have been hired since 9/11. This creates what has been called a "bathtub curve" (where the surge of new analysts is at one end of the time line and the large number of soon-to-be retirees is at the other end. In the middle is a smaller number of people who were hired between the end of the Cold War and 9/11).

All this makes it even more difficult to estimate how many entry-level jobs (including analyst jobs) there are in a given year. I would guess (and it is only a guess) that the "normal" number of analyst positions that need to be filled each year in the US government falls somewhere between half this idealized replacement rate to twice that rate or from about 350 to 1400.

These replacement rate numbers are particularly important as the halcyon days of the hiring boom in intelligence over the last 8 years are likely over. Budget strains are virtually certain to put a damper on significant levels of hiring beyond the replacement rate although the importance of the intelligence mission and the continued emergence of new threats (we are hearing that there will continue to be a growth market in cyber threat analysts into the next year and beyond, for example) will likely ensure that replacements get hired for those analysts and others who retire or quit.

The situation gets even worse, though, when you look at some of the agencies. The CIA is reporting a record number of applications this year -- 180,000 -- for the jobs they have open. The CIA has about 20,000 people in it and, if the overall percentage of analysts in the IC holds true for the CIA, then that means that there are about 3400 (17% of 20,000) analysts housed at Langley. Without any growth and if 5% of them are leaving or retiring this year then there are roughly (very roughly) 170 analyst positions available.

Furthermore, if 17% of the 180,000 applicants are trying to fill analyst positions then getting an analyst job at the CIA is about 18 times harder than getting accepted to Harvard as an undergrad (Harvard's acceptance rate in 2007 was 9.2%. 17% X 180,000 = 30,600. 170/30,600 = .6%).

All of these are just logical guesses but even if I am wrong by half (in other words, the number of jobs is twice what I estimate it to be) the total number of jobs and jobs available each year in the US Intelligence Community (and the number of analyst jobs in particular) is by no means enormous.

Including the number of analyst and other jobs available through contractors does not actually improve the picture that much. If recent numbers are accurate, then there are only about 37,000 contract employees in the US IC. Again, how many of these are analyst positions is unknown but if the 17% rule holds true here as well, it means an increase of a little more than 6000 analysts positions available through various contractors.

While not insubstantial, the number of entry-level positions through contractors is probably even more limited as we go into 2010 than through the government directly. In the first place, a significant number of intelligence professionals take jobs through contractors when they retire. In the second place, the days of large contracts for intelligence services seems to be coming to an end. I suspect that many of these contract jobs may get "converted" to government positions rather than go away (the government is going to still need the analysts regardless of who the analysts work for) over the next several years but the absolute number of positions that will need to be filled each year is probably in lower half of the 75-450 range.

In short, if you add up everything and round it all off to make it easy to wrap your head around it, there are likely about 1000 analyst jobs a year in the combined government and contractor worlds supporting the US IC. The number could be as low as around 400 or as high as about 2000 but given limited prospects for growth and some guess-timates for replacement rates, 1000 seems about right.

A couple of other things come out of this analysis. First, the competition for these jobs is fierce. I strongly suspect that the CIA gets the lion's share of attention when it comes to job applications but I would also guess that, in this economy, all 16 members of the intel community and the contractors that support them have seen an increase in the number of applications.

Likewise, not all of these 1000 or so positions are truly "entry-level". It is inevitable that some, perhaps many, of these positions are limited to people with significant levels of experience or who speak Farsi fluently or whatever.

Finally, I may well be off by a significant amount here. In addition to being terrible at math, the numbers I am basing this analysis on may be gross under- or over-estimates (it IS the intelligence community after all...). I am hoping that some of the readers of this blog will post a comment or two pointing us all to some major hiring binge that I have missed.

Even if I am wrong, however, I think the first thing that job seekers need to fully understand is that the US national security market is both limited and competitive.

Tomorrow: The Good News!

Combating Terror With Communication, A Foreign Assessment Of The CIA, FBI And US Foreign Policy In Africa (Fora.tv)

Some interesting short snippets from some recent Fora.tv broadcasts (and one longer presentation):

Combating Terror with Communication
R. Gustav Niebuhr explains that, while we may live in frightening times, the only way to maintain hope is by maintaining dialogue with people we may believe to be the enemy. Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 (4 min. 35 sec)
Location: Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY

A Foreign Assessment of the CIA and FBI
Nigel Inkster and Peter Clarke assess the strengths and weaknesses of the CIA and the FBI, praising the CIA and saying, "the CIA have been treated disgracefully in this country," receiving the blame for what is the fault of policy. They also exhort that a barrier should never be built between intelligence and law enforcement. Date: Sat, 05 JUL 2008 (4 min 17 sec)
Location: The Aspen Institute, Aspen, CO

Vicki Huddleston - United States Foreign Policy to Africa
Vicki Huddleston discusses The United States and Africa: A Chance for Change as a part of American Foreign Policy: Leadership and Dialogue during the 2008 Chautauqua Institution morning lecture series. Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 (1 hour 8 mini)
Location: Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY

CIA To Travel In Time, Assassinate Musician (Aversion)

April Fool's! Aversion.com, which covers the rock, punk and indie music scenes, posted a pretty good April Fool's story today complete with alleged quotes from the DCIA Michael Hayden (My favorite? "Hayden dismissed criticisms of the plan, and pointed to the Agency's track record of righting pop-music wrongs by careful manipulation of history."). For the full story, go here.

DCIA Hayden's Comments On The National Threat Assessment (US Fed News via OSINFO)

Following the DNI's presentation of the latest Threat Assessment (see here for the full text, here for my summarized version), DCIA Mike Hayden made some prepared follow-on remarks that talk about what the CIA is doing and how they are doing it. Of most interest to intel studies students is probably this passage:

• "We're able to hire from among the best and brightest - our Recruitment Center received 125,000 resumes in Fiscal Year 2007, and we hired a near-record number of new officers, more than a quarter of whom belonged to racial or ethnic minorities. While many of these new officers are recent college graduates, many others have years of experience in the private sector, the military, or other government agencies. Almost 40 percent have advanced degrees."

• "We're a young work force - half of our officers have entered on duty since 9/11, and many are under 30. Training, developing, and retaining these new officers is a top priority, particularly because 20 percent of our work force will become eligible to retire during the next five years. We're intensifying our leadership training and have revamped our Strategic Language Plan to address our needs in Arabic and other mission-critical languages."

What Do Che Guevara And The CIA Have In Common? (COIN: CARL)

They have both written manuals on staging a revolution! The good people at the Combined Arms Research Library have made available online both Guevara's 1961 text, "Guerrilla Warfare" (direct download here) and the CIA's 1984 book used by the Contras titled, "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare" (direct download here).

The two texts overlap only in areas. Guevara's book is a more complete manual for the revolutionary while the CIA text is more about crafting the message of the revolutionary forces. There are, however, a number of interesting sections that will resonate with today's COIN specialists. I found Guevara's section on intelligence (which he begins with a quote from Sun Tzu: Know yourself and your adversary and you will be able to fight a hundred battles without a single disaster.) to be the most interesting. Here are a few highlights:

• "Nothing gives more help to combatant forces than correct information. This arrives spontaneously from the local inhabitants, who will come to tell its friendly army, its allies, what is happening in various places; but in addition it should be completely systematized."
  

• "Men and women, especially women, should infiltrate; they should be in permanent contact with soldiers and gradually discover what there is to be discovered."
  

• "The peasants, not accustomed to precise battle language, have a strong tendency to exaggerate, so their reports must be checked."

The CIA manual contains a number of interesting nuggets as well:

• "Every member of the struggle should know that his political mission is as important as, if not more important than, his tactical mission."
  

• "Armed propaganda in small towns, rural villages, and city residential districts should give the impression that our weapons are not for exercising power over the people, but rather that the weapons are for protecting the people..."
  

• "Cover ("Facade") Organizations. The fusion of several organizations and associations recognized by the government, through internal subjective control, occurs in the final stages of the operation, in close cooperation with mass meetings."
  

• "Control Of Mass Demonstrations. The mixture of elements of the struggle with participants in the demonstration will give the appearance of a spontaneous demonstration, lacking direction, which will be used by the agitators of the struggle to control the behavior of the masses."
  

• "Too often we see guerrilla warfare only from the point of view of combat actions. This view is erroneous and extremely dangerous. Combat actions are not the key to victory in guerrilla warfare but rather form part of one of the six basic efforts. There is no priority in any of the efforts, but rather they should progress in a parallel manner. The emphasis or exclusion of any of these efforts could bring about serious difficulties, and in the worst of cases, even failure. The history of revolutionary wars has shown this reality."
  

By far, my favorite part of this text, however, is in the appendix which seeks to acquaint the revolutionary with the rhetorical practices of anaphora, prolepsis and preterition (among others). You kinda have to see it to believe it...

Bad Intelligence: America's History of Bungled Spying (Alternet.org)

Interesting article by Larry Beinhart about the costs of secrecy and the intel capabilities of the US on Alternet this morning. It seems to focus on the negatives and, even the few positives it reports, it manages to turn into negatives. It is likely that only an intel historian with a deep knowledge of the facts would be able to contradict or even add nuance to the parade of horribles. CIA historian Nicholas Dujmovic tried to do exactly that in a recent edition of CIA's in-house journal, Studies In Intelligence, with respect to Tim Weiner's recent book Legacy of Ashes (which Beinhart cites). Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, went on to receive the National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes.