Given my current skill set, what companies would love to hire me?
April 13, 2015 2:27 PM Subscribe
I'm currently working in prospect research in higher ed, and I'm thinking of moving on to a new position in the near future. While ideally I'd like to stay in the same field, I've managed to become somewhat knowledgeable in a few different areas, and was wondering if there are other industries/companies that might be searching for people with my skill set. Ironically enough, I'm not sure where to start looking, so I'd would love to hear your suggestions!
My job right now largely consists of putting together wealth and biographical profiles on potential donors, and it turns out I'm super great at digging up obscure assets and making connections between far-flung bits of information (once I managed to link a donor to a generically-named Canadian family foundation where they weren't listed as trustees through the fact that the foundation made an anonymous scholarship grant named for the deceased parents of the donor's spouse, given through the same bank used to give to my institution).
Since I look a lot into financial information, I've gotten pretty good at parsing SEC filings, IRS 990 forms, US/UK real estate records (NYC in particular), finding publicly available salary information, and making reasonable estimates when it's not. I'm also somewhat of a subject matter expert on hiring and profit structures in the fashion industry and how to get access to LinkedIn profiles that LinkedIn doesn't want you to see. FWIW, I also learned enough VBA for Excel (after getting sick of formatting the same spreadsheets every single week) to cobble together functional macros if I do a lot of c&p-ing from Stack Overflow, and enough HTML/CSS to extract useful metadata like non-english text and image source files.
I've looked at job listings on LinkedIn, but the vast majority of the results that have come up are for finance/accounting positions that I don't have the background for, or for fields that require very specific knowledge (like biotech) that I likewise don't have the background for. Thanks in advance MeFi!
My job right now largely consists of putting together wealth and biographical profiles on potential donors, and it turns out I'm super great at digging up obscure assets and making connections between far-flung bits of information (once I managed to link a donor to a generically-named Canadian family foundation where they weren't listed as trustees through the fact that the foundation made an anonymous scholarship grant named for the deceased parents of the donor's spouse, given through the same bank used to give to my institution).
Since I look a lot into financial information, I've gotten pretty good at parsing SEC filings, IRS 990 forms, US/UK real estate records (NYC in particular), finding publicly available salary information, and making reasonable estimates when it's not. I'm also somewhat of a subject matter expert on hiring and profit structures in the fashion industry and how to get access to LinkedIn profiles that LinkedIn doesn't want you to see. FWIW, I also learned enough VBA for Excel (after getting sick of formatting the same spreadsheets every single week) to cobble together functional macros if I do a lot of c&p-ing from Stack Overflow, and enough HTML/CSS to extract useful metadata like non-english text and image source files.
I've looked at job listings on LinkedIn, but the vast majority of the results that have come up are for finance/accounting positions that I don't have the background for, or for fields that require very specific knowledge (like biotech) that I likewise don't have the background for. Thanks in advance MeFi!
Places that might be interested in someone who is good at being nosy :)
Law firms (maybe ones that focus on say, child support or debt collection)
Private investigators
Companies like Dun & Bradstreet that specialize in business information (their entry-level analyst positions look like they don't require any specific background)
I don't know if/how these places actually hire for this sort of task, I've just been thinking about it because I have a similar penchant for digging up dirt and solidifying tenuous links.
Also while you're looking up information about all these foundations and donors, they are (hopefully) doing the exact same thing for all the orgs that they're considering making donations or grants to.
posted by yeahlikethat at 5:47 AM on April 14, 2015
Law firms (maybe ones that focus on say, child support or debt collection)
Private investigators
Companies like Dun & Bradstreet that specialize in business information (their entry-level analyst positions look like they don't require any specific background)
I don't know if/how these places actually hire for this sort of task, I've just been thinking about it because I have a similar penchant for digging up dirt and solidifying tenuous links.
Also while you're looking up information about all these foundations and donors, they are (hopefully) doing the exact same thing for all the orgs that they're considering making donations or grants to.
posted by yeahlikethat at 5:47 AM on April 14, 2015
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posted by Miko at 7:32 PM on April 13, 2015