831 roles · 30 March – 25 August 2026
The political risk job market is mostly unlabelled.
Every mark below is a real opening collected over five months. The lit ones are the twenty-eight whose title contains the words political risk.
Bottom line
Political risk hiring does not work the way people entering it are told it does. Across 831 confirmed openings collected over five months, 28 — 3.4% — carry the phrase in the job title. There is no shortlist of firms to watch: 316 employers appear, and 77% of them posted exactly one role. And the largest part of the field is the hardest to enter, while one of the smallest is the easiest.
The door is not where the field's reputation says it is.
The field is wider than the phrase
Roles were classified into eight functions on the basis of title, description and topic, independent of whether the posting used any particular vocabulary.
| Function | Roles | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate security | 257 | 30.9% |
| Country & regional analysis | 158 | 19.0% |
| Threat intelligence | 126 | 15.2% |
| Unclassified | 102 | 12.3% |
| Government affairs | 79 | 9.5% |
| Sanctions & export controls | 54 | 6.5% |
| Due diligence & investigations | 40 | 4.8% |
| Supply chain risk | 13 | 1.6% |
| ESG & human rights | 2 | 0.2% |
The largest single function is corporate security, at 30.9% of roles. Most of those postings never use the phrase political risk anywhere, and a keyword search returns none of them.
Three measures of the same thing, from strictest to loosest. The strictest is the employer's own wording; the loosest is our classification. Even taking the most generous count, someone searching the phrase sees under a sixth of the market.
The door is not where you would guess
Splitting each function by seniority produces the most consequential table here. The largest part of the field is almost closed to entrants. The most open one is a compliance job most candidates never consider.
| Function | Roles | Entry-level |
|---|---|---|
| Sanctions & export controls | 54 | 53.7% |
| Country & regional analysis | 158 | 26.6% |
| Government affairs | 79 | 24.1% |
| Threat intelligence | 126 | 17.5% |
| Due diligence & investigations | 40 | 17.5% |
| Corporate security | 257 | 6.2% |
Functions with fewer than 20 roles are omitted: percentages on a base that small describe noise, not the market.
Corporate security is 30.9% of the field and 6.2% entry-level. It is a function people arrive at mid-career, from somewhere else. Sanctions and export controls is 6.5% of the field and 53.7% entry-level — the roles are real, junior, and hiring: OFAC and Sanctions Analyst, Financial Crimes Sanctions Analyst I, Sanctions Screening Analyst, Research Associate, International Trade.
You enter on analysis. You advance on operations.
Reading what the roles involve — rather than what they are called — against seniority produces a consistent pattern. Every analytical and compliance activity falls as seniority rises. Every operational and managerial one climbs.
| Activity | Entry | Mid | Senior | Exec |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Country & geopolitical analysis | 30.3% | 22.4% | 19.5% | 14.8% |
| Policy analysis & research | 23.0% | 10.7% | 9.9% | 7.4% |
| Compliance & regulatory | 19.7% | 8.6% | 7.7% | 9.9% |
| Sanctions & financial crime | 19.1% | 5.8% | 2.9% | 2.5% |
| Threat intelligence & monitoring | 15.1% | 28.2% | 18.4% | 9.9% |
| Physical & personnel security | 11.2% | 31.9% | 42.6% | 34.6% |
| Crisis & incident response | 6.6% | 21.2% | 37.5% | 38.3% |
| Programme & project management | 3.9% | 15.3% | 18.4% | 23.5% |
| Government & stakeholder relations | 9.2% | 6.1% | 9.2% | 21.0% |
Band sizes: entry 152, mid 326, senior 272, executive 81. Roles routinely involve several activities, so columns do not sum to 100%.
This has a practical reading. The analytical work most people enter this field wanting is concentrated at the door, not at the top. Seniority in political risk is largely a move into running things — crises, teams, programmes, relationships — rather than a move deeper into analysis.
There is no shortlist of firms
Of the 444 roles naming an employer, 316 distinct organisations appear. 244 of them — 77% — posted exactly one role in five months. The ten most frequent employers together account for 12.2% of named roles.
For anyone job hunting, this is the most consequential fact in the report. A watchlist of firms cannot cover this field, because the field does not concentrate. And the employers that do appear are not the ones a reading list would predict:
- Anthropic
- OpenAI
- Visa
- Capital One
- American Express
- Citi
- Goldman Sachs
- JPMorganChase
- Marsh McLennan
- Leidos
- FIFA
- Mastercard
- TikTok
- Enbridge
- Crisis24
- Control Risks
- Eurasia Group
- Council on Foreign Relations
Employer name is present on 53.4% of rows, and its absence is a property of the source rather than the role — two feeds supply company names on every record, two supply them rarely. Read this as indicative of the market, not as a census of it.
What this implies for someone entering
The three findings compose into a single picture, and it is not the one most people carry into this field.
A straight line into a named political risk consultancy is the path almost everyone attempts and the one the data supports least: those firms are a small share of a fragmented market, their entry-level intake is thin, and competition for it is concentrated precisely because everyone can name them.
The structure of the market suggests something less direct. Enter where the door is actually open — sanctions and compliance, country and regional analysis, government affairs — spend two or three years building substantive expertise, and move laterally later on the strength of the work. Sanctions analysis at a bank is political risk work: reading policy, assessing jurisdictions, making judgment calls under uncertainty on a deadline. It is a credible platform to move from, and it hires people at the start of their careers.
The field is not closed. The front door is somewhere other than where everyone is knocking.
Method
What this is
870 postings collected between 30 March and 25 August 2026 through six channels: a news and alerting feed, LinkedIn, a specialist political risk board, a curated LinkedIn feed, direct employer career pages, and manual collection. 39 records were rejected on inspection as not being job postings — expired listings that redirect to a careers index return a page of text that is not a role. 831 confirmed openings form the base of every figure above, and 154 were live at the time of writing.
These are descriptive statistics: counts and shares of what the board actually collected. Function, seniority and date are recorded on every one of the 831 records, which is what the figures above rest on.
How to read it
- Shares are of this corpus. Six sources, five months, one board. A wider net would change the totals; we would expect the shape to hold.
- Roles collected, not roles posted. We report the composition of the corpus rather than month-to-month movement, since collection improved over the window.
- Employer coverage varies by source. A company name appears on 53.4% of records, and the employer table states that base. Two feeds name the employer on every record; two rarely do.
On classification
Function is assigned from title, topic tags and description. 102 roles (12.3%) could not be classified with confidence and are retained as unclassified rather than dropped, so every distribution above sums to 831. Activity categories were built by collapsing an open tag vocabulary of 976 terms into 22 controlled concepts, which covers roughly two thirds of tag instances; the remainder is long-tail specificity left unmapped.
Sourcing
186 of the 831 roles (22.4%) reached the board through a private professional feed rather than a public listing. Where a role was surfaced from another board, that board is credited on the listing and readers are pointed back to it.
Coming in the next edition
This is the first edition, and the corpus grows every week. Three things we are building toward:
- Requirements analysis. What postings actually ask for — years of experience, degree level, languages, named tools and skills — broken out by function. We are capturing full descriptions now, and this becomes reportable as that set fills out.
- Geography. Where the roles are, and which functions cluster in which markets. Location coverage is improving as capture widens.
- Compensation. Stated pay by function and seniority, once enough postings across enough markets carry a figure to make the comparison worth publishing.
If there is a cut of this you would find useful, say so and we will look at it for the next edition.
The underlying board
These roles are collected continuously and published free at jobs.exergyintl.com. PRDM is a free community for people working in or entering political risk.
Read more about PRDM