It can be difficult for aspiring, career changers, and junior business analysts seeking to gain business analysis experience in today’s market when looking for a business analyst job opportunity and seeking to improve your business analyst skills.
You may have experience in a related discipline such as a software developer or tester and looking to switch career or profile to a business analyst. Many ask what what is the best way to get a job as business analyst? Will doing courses/classes help? or are there any other options? You may have applied to many companies for the position of a business analyst but haven’t even got an interview.
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Sometimes the biggest challenge is to get your official first business analyst role especially, if your transitioning into the IT field from another industry.
For many the question is simply, how can I improve my business skills? Some followers of business analyst mentor don’t yet have the business analysis experience that employers always ask for. This has always been a frequently asked question and one of the biggest hurdles for new business analysts to jump.
From years of experience of helping others to break into the business analyst industry we are happy to share with you some ideas and experiences of how you could start building up your business analysis profile and practical experience even before being in a formal business analysis role.
Improve Your Business Analyst Skills – Volunteering
To help improve your business analysis skills and experience, if you have some free time available or are not currently working, why not volunteer to help a friend’s business, local club, or local society to improve their processes (process modelling) in some way.
Most businesses have a pain point somewhere in their end-to-end business processes and it is likely that you can help them with some of your valuable business analysis skills. You can understand their business pain points (elicitation), analyse the root-cause of those issues (root-cause analysis), do some research about potential online tools (solutions) they can use to improve their business in some way and prepare solution comparisons for them to enable them to choose the best solution to implement.
You may wish to use some use and reference some extremely useful business analysis templates
with examples to help you on volunteering and provide a useful reference point to help ensure you are on the right tracks with the activities that your doing.
By documenting every step of the work, you do, you are not only gaining practical experience but building a portfolio of example business analysis deliverables you have created. Doing these types of volunteer-based business analysis activities gives you valuable experience to add to your business analyst cv/resume. In this way, by example you gain valuable experience in elicitation, analysis, stakeholder engagement and modelling skills.
Also, consequently, the people you do some volunteering for will be so grateful for your help that they would be glad to act as a reference when you do a good job. You will also have some real practical business analysis experience to add to your cv/resume and impress any future employers with your dedication, proactiveness and enthusiasm.
Improve Your Business Analyst Skills – Freelancing
Some aspiring, career changers, and junior business analysts have considered doing some freelance projects online to build their professional experience as a business analyst.
Building up and setting up an online profile may take some effort, but it can be well worth it, to help gain some useful experience.
Employers are more and more posting analysis tasks and jobs online on freelance or remote working websites which provides you with the opportunity to either build a professional freelancing business analysis career or to simply use this as an entry point for gaining some valuable practical experience to use on your cv/resume.
Some websites which provide such an opportunity including
Improve Your Business Analyst Skills – Educate Yourself
To help improve your business analysis skills and experience, aspiring, career changers, and junior business analysts should as part of their initial steps consider doing a business analysis foundations course to learn some specific practical skills and build up knowledge of business analysis.
A good business analysis fundamentals course will also teach you practical techniques and tools which is currently in demand. The most important reason for doing a fundamentals course is that you can put this on your business analysis cv/resume. This will show potential employers that you have some formal training to support your business analysis cv/resume.
Another key advantage of doing some formal business analysis training is that it will help you to identify some practical experience in your previous roles that could be transferrable to business analysis. If you have transferrable skills, then you can easily translate this in your cv/resume as business analysis experience and capabilities.
Improve Your Business Analyst Skills – Your Current Employer
To help improve your business analysis skills and experience, if you have the benefit of currently being employed, then you can consider asking your current manager to help you find a business analysis role within your current organisation. Most organisations will either have a community of business analysts or have work activities that require business analysis skills.
In career planning within your current organisation, don’t be afraid to make your intentions of becoming a business analyst clear to your line manager and other key people. Most organisations and people generally love helping other people and if you keep asking and focusing on these types of opportunities, you will find something opening.
