What would a career in Intelligence be like?

Question

Hey there,

Im currently in the final year of my International Studies degree and im starting to think about what I would like to do afterwards.

My favourite option would be a career in Intelligence at either the internal agency 'ASIO' or the external one, 'ASIS'. My second preference would be Federal Policing with the 'AFP'.

I dont wanna exclude non-Aussie responders, so below im relating the Australian agencies with their UK and US counterparts.

ASIO / MI5 / FBI

ASIS / MI6 / CIA

AFP / SOCA / Theres like +50! As far as i know

But yea, basicly i just wanted to hear peoples impressions about work in Intelligence and Federal Policing and how well they regard those careers.

Would also appreciate comments from people with experience in the public sector.

Cheers,

Answer 1

Unfortunately you won't find out much specific before you get into it.  You can't.  You probably wouldn't be killed, but people could lose their jobs (and any possibility of ever working in their field again) or even go to prison for telling too much.

I'm sure there are many exciting careers out there in intel.  Mine wasn't.  It was short too, but not because it was boring (it was because I worked for a really S****y unit and had no hope of escaping it).  Even if you end up doing something tedious (and I had the most tedious intel job in the US military, I'm sure...and I was good at it) you'll find little nuances and details that you can obsess over to make it interesting.  No one else who isn't directly in on it will have a clue why something is funny, but it won't matter, because they don't need to know so you aren't supposed to talk about it with them anyway.  

Intel is (mostly) about taking lots of little pieces of information and putting them together to make big pieces of information.  There are "eureka!" moments, but depending exactly what you end up focusing on, you may never have one yourself.  If you've never had the patience to build models, or to put together thousand piece jigsaw puzzles (or anything else that requires a lot of waiting and a lot of accomplishing big things in lots of tiny little steps), I'd suggest going into another field.

Answer 2

Full of stress.Required to do heinous things.

Answer 3

If we told you, we'd have to kill you.

Answer 4

Police work has one common theme, boredom, boredom, boredom and then suddenly without warning danger alerts blasting off on your senses. You go from trying to avoid getting fatter to needing your mental and physical abilities to be firing on all cylinders in an instant!

Lots of heart and mental health problems in this career field.

You have to do better than this career field to work for a life time. Stay in school and get a better job in a short amount of time.