Hannah Goodfriend, a diversity, equity and culture senior analyst for NASDAQ, counts herself among the people for whom a career tracked them down rather than her finding a career.
As Goodfriend states, “Did not choose this career, this career chose me.” She said this because of how an internship turned into her full time job.
Nasdaq, Inc. is a worldwide financial services corporation based in New York City that owns and manages three stock exchanges, the NASDAQ stock exchange, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and the Boston Stock Exchange.
She was an intern at NASDAQ for two years before getting recruited as their internet communications intern in 2019. That internship was then extended for two more years. After those years a position opened as an analyst for diversity, equity, and culture. She then got promoted and that’s how she became a senior analyst.
“Most companies have what they call employee resource groups, they are to support diversity, we have them for gay employees, black employees, ect,” said Goodfriend. Her main responsibilities as a senior analyst are to manage the memberships of all eleven employee resource groups at NASDAQ.
“It’s a lot of checking emails,” said Goodfriend, “But I also get to organize fun events like during cinco de mayo.”
The job allows Goodfriend to truly see the impact that she has on the workplace as a whole. As Goodfriend said “My job and my team’s job is to make the people that work here happy and happy about working here as well as making people feel better about working there.”
This is important to her as they are able to see improvements based on the work that they do.
Goodfriend states that the most important skills needed for the job are people skills, as she said “Good communication skills, sensitive to other people, and understanding people’s emotions. I work with human resources so you need to be very adept at understanding people.”
Goodfriend advised that those who were interested in a field similar to hers to study English literature. As she put it, “I studied english literature in college, and that combines those skills very well, reading about other people’s feelings allow you to better understand people’s emotions.”
In terms of aspiration and influence, those who helped Goodfriend the most would be the very supportive managers that she has had. As Goodfriend said, “I was very lucky to have such supportive managers who were able to allow me to be who I am, that is what led me to where I am today.
It was difficult to find the median pay for such a specific job but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics management analysts make around $93,000 per year or about $44.71 per hour.
As well as the fact that the job outlook for this occupation otherwise known as the growth rate for this job is around fourteen percent which is higher than average.
Also according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, analysts tend to have pretty extensive work weeks with some working up to forty hours a week. As Goodfriend states, “it’s about four hours of meetings and around four hours of free work.”
On average entry level education for an analyst job would be a bachelors degree and also require less than five years of experience. This coincides with what was said by Goodfriend as she was an intern for around four years before the new position opened that allowed her to be promoted.
Most of the analysts often work in an environment that is most often in technical, scientific, or professional services, this also corresponds with what Goodfriend said as majority of the work she did was technical work on the computer.
This is important because it means that adaptability to technology and working with technology is crucial to the job and if you are not comfortable or do not want to be working on the computer as a living then this career would definitely not be for you.
The skills necessary to be able to succeed in this career are also very similar to what was said by Goodfriend. Those being interpersonal, communications, and problem solving skills among other skills as well.
As a final piece of advice for those who want to work in a similar job, Goodfriend said, ”you should not let your major distract you or detract you from what you want to do in life. You should not be defined by your major, what you major in is not your career path and do not let your major define you.”
MFJS Reporter Spring 2022 