CIA Reviews

Pros

Excellent colleagues, extensive opportunities, opportunities to address exciting issues.

Cons

Bureaucracies can be frustrating. Seniority takes too much precedence over performance

Advice to Senior Management

Limit the tasks, state focused on the basic mission.

Pros

At the CIA, you feel like you do work that actually makes a difference. They have a structured training program and hold different classes and seminars at least once a week, usually at the main headquarters. Because there are so many employees, there are groups and clubs within the organization for special interests such as Mandarin practice. Their salary is competitive and you are surrounded by hard-working, good people.

Cons

You have to lie to almost everyone about what you do for a living or how your day was at work. You cannot have friends from certain countries. If you will be staying in the same house/room with a non-US citizen, you must report it and have it approved in advanced.

Advice to Senior Management

Organize the recruitment stage better and communicate more with those you're recruiting. Develop more social programs for the interns. Hold more events in offices other than headquarters.

Pros

- The mission and impact on real events can't be beaten.
- In general, the workforce is among the most dedicated I've ever seen.
- Overseas opportunities.
- Work/life balance

Cons

It's in the Federal Government, so you have all the same cons:
- Bad senior management, severe lack of leadership
- Poor performers shuffled around and not fired.
- Lack of pay equality to private sector professionals doing the same job
- Over-reliance on contractors at the expense of caring about staff in technology fields
- Odds of promotion from GS-15 to the executive levels are extremely remote. The executive managers get big bonuses each year while the rest of us on the GS scale get nothing.

Advice to Senior Management

Eliminate the horrible promotion system and let managers who directly manage the people determine who gets promoted.

Pros

Serving your country.
Relative job security.
Good stepping stone for international relations majors to other analyst jobs.
D.C. Area is a great place to work and network

Cons

Most intelligence is open source( newspapers) so it's not as glamorous as its made out to be
Office politics
No one will read what you compile

Advice to Senior Management

Improve intelligence sharing protocol.

Pros

Meaningful mission.
Rewards if one works hard, does well, and is a little lucky.
Meeting phenomenal people who put mission and country before self and money.

Cons

Poor management at senior levels is not recognized and corrected.
Constant reorganization and movement of people.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to the work force - ask questions of the work force.

Pros

The sky is the limit here, you can do so much and they encourage you to become a well rounded employee.

Cons

Sometimes managements expectations of you are not always clear. You have to actively pursue clear expectations in order to make sure you meet then and put yourself in the best position for promotion.

Advice to Senior Management

Always be open to employee suggestions and feedback.

Pros

challenging, interesting, motivating work with chances to transfer internally over a career to try whatever you're interested in. lots of enthusiastic young people make for an invigorating team in most areas. management officially supports flexible schedules, professional growth through academic or personal research or language training, some chances to travel depending on your work. pay seems good at the starting levels for recent college/graduate school hires, but promises of rapid advancement are contingent on long hours and taking on high-profile but limited projects in many offices.

Cons

Hiring overload of the past decade means lots of talented young people fighting for management recognition to gain promotion to higher grades, limited number of experienced "senior" mentors to teach all the new people. Senior members of teams and offices have their pick of projects, travel, and high-level rotations. Management overwhelmed by their workload makes it a tough career path although offers better chances of promotion. Short-term they support balance and flexibility but long-term being in the office less hours or at "off" hours means less recognition, like most places.

Advice to Senior Management

More consistent recognition of staff's efforts, knowledge building, an long-term goals would help make them feel they're not hired only to get the job done today with little interest in next year.

Pros

--Job security, especially in an uncertain economy
--Great benefits, including pension with employer contributions
--Good work/life balance
--Opportunities to do different jobs and kinds of work, including living and working overseas
--Training and travel opportunities
--Well-educated and smart colleagues

Cons

--Mediocre and unprofessional management
--Bureaucratic mindset among analysts and managers
--Obsession with "chasing the news" and little focus on real analysis
--Satisfied with mediocre written products
--Closed-minded and unwilling to consider new and different ideas
--A good ten years behind the times in utilizing new technologies and processes for the general workforce

Advice to Senior Management

--Stop rewarding and promoting managers who only care about looking good to their seniors and reward and promote managers who strive to develop their analysts
--Train analysts to be generalists first and specialists second; too many analysts are so focused on the trees that they don't see the forest, which probably will result in another big intelligence failure

Pros

-prestige
-security clearance
-making a difference in the world

Cons

-low salary
-can't talk about work much

Advice to Senior Management

no comment

Pros

Absolutely a sense of mission with some really motivated people. Some very cool jobs available. You feel your job is very important, and that you're really doing something that matters. Absolutely no chance of getting fired unless you do something horrible like racially or sexually harass someone. If you want a 30-year employers with many different types of jobs, CIA is great.

Cons

Many levels of management are almost uniformly awful. All levels of employees are constantly sent to BS training courses. Managers seem to spend half their time in management training courses which are clearly counter productive. Bureaucracy as expected of any federal government agency.

The absolute worst thing for me was that the best and the worst employees were treated exactly the same in many cases. Same salary, same job titles, same seniority. Need a way to weed out horrible employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn how to WEED OUT bad managers (and bad employees). Since nobody is ever, EVER fired, it seems as if the employees who suck at their jobs become managers. Upper management in my experience was mostly professional and competent. Team level and middle managers were very mixed--some good, some REALLY bad. Management is not the place for passive aggressive introverts with poor people skills.