Strategic Analyst

If you’ve ever played chess, you know that acting on impulse is a good way to lose the game. To win, you’ve got to carefully plan your moves, instead. In that way, chess and business are a lot alike: Whether you’re moving kings or manufacturing and marketing their crowns, achieving checkmate requires always thinking before you act.

As a Strategic Analyst, you do the thinking. Found most often in companies’ sales and marketing departments — although you might just as easily work in other divisions, such as research and development, operations, finance, or even human resources — the job usually boils down to one thing: business intelligence.

In fact, you’re the corporate version of an Intelligence Analyst, which means you spend your days as a Strategic Analyst helping companies gather data, then analyze it in order to make informed decisions about offensive and defensive actions, such as what products to sell, in what quantities, and to what customers.

Your information might come from surveys, interviews, financial reports, or market research, and it might contain any number of data sets: related, for example, to demographics, costs, pricing, sales, supply and demand, or market performance. No matter what it says or where it comes from, however, it’s your job as a Strategic Analyst to summarize and communicate the data by transforming it into briefings, presentations, and reports that can be easily understood by the Managers and Supervisors who make tactical business decisions.

Think of it this way: Like a Chef turning raw ingredients into a dish, or a Florist turning flowers into a bouquet, you make numbers fit for consumption by arranging and interpreting them.