How To Become A Director Of Intelligence: What It Is and Career Path

What is a director of intelligence and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

4 min read

Intelligence is strongly associated with schools. This is understandable because it is through schooling that we gain a lot of knowledge and skills - two components of intelligence. What we sometimes forget is intelligence may be applied in places outside the school setting. Governments have intelligence funds in order to gain information regarding other countries and possible insurgencies. In the same way, companies invest in intelligence to gain a competitive advantage and market information. The company's director of intelligence oversees this.

Directors of intelligence manage the team in charge of collecting and processing intelligence data. They may get these data through publicly-available information, industry-specific digests, or even mystery shopper activities. After collecting intelligence data, they would then process these and come up with recommendations on how to improve company operations. Improvements may be in the form of new products or services, process efficiencies, and other activities.

If you like gathering and analyzing data, this is a good career goal for you. Of course, you need to have a strong interest in a specific field because this will be an advantage for you. Lastly, you need to have leadership skills in order to become a director-level in a company.

ScoreDirector Of IntelligenceUS Average

Salary

8.8

Avg. Salary $146,003

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

8.6

Growth rate 16%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

1.7

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.21%

Asian 12.74%

Black or African American 6.52%

Hispanic or Latino 9.78%

Unknown 5.18%

White 65.57%

Gender

female 20.63%

male 79.37%

Age - 47

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 47

Stress level

8.6

Stress level is very high

7.1 - high

Complexity level

8.7

Complexity level is advanced

7 - challenging

Work life balance

6.1

Work life balance is fair

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a director of intelligence

Explore director of intelligence education requirements

Most common director of intelligence degrees

Bachelor's

66.2 %

Master's

24.3 %

Associate

4.7 %

Start to develop specific director of intelligence skills

Skills	Percentages
Analytics	12.62%
Business Intelligence	8.27%
Project Management	6.41%
Tableau	5.67%
Visualization	4.75%

Complete relevant director of intelligence training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 6-12 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New directors of intelligence learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a director of intelligence based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real director of intelligence resumes.

Research director of intelligence duties and responsibilities

Manage the compliance level of all development projects in accordance with corporate standards including GxP and SOX.
Integrate ERP systems with homegrown manage care system to produce fully automate interface solutions.
Align the business strategy and solutions architecture to achieve maximum ROI of business consolidation and removing application redundancy across core domains.
Lead ETL team in purposefully redesigning existing data warehouse to accommodate demanding and continually changing business needs.

Get director of intelligence experience

Generally, it takes 6-8 years to become a director of intelligence. The most common roles before becoming a director of intelligence include manager, intelligence officer team lead and intelligence analyst.

Prepare your director of intelligence resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your director of intelligence resume.

You can use Zippia's AI resume builder to make the resume writing process easier while also making sure that you include key information that hiring managers expect to see on a director of intelligence resume. You'll find resume tips and examples of skills, responsibilities, and summaries, all provided by Zippi, your career sidekick.

Choose from 10+ customizable director of intelligence resume templates

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