8 Hard & Soft Skills for Your BA Career
Someone has asked me a casual question that caused a lot of reflection
I’ve been approached by someone on LinkedIn not long ago. That person was looking for a piece of career advice, and one of the things they asked was:
What were the hard and soft skills that helped you the most?
Not an easy thing to answer, I mean — how can you assess the impact a particular skill has made on your career? But thinking about it, I believe I’ve landed on a list of skills that I use the most and see the most value in having.
In this list, I am specifically avoiding obvious skillsets as defined by your job description. To be successful in your job you need to know how it’s done, duh :) The list below will help you advance your career, even if those items do not directly appear in your responsibilities.
Hard skills
1.Number one goes the business process management. Not a particular modelling or analysis package, but rather understanding how to analyse workflows as processes, how to draw the line between different activities and streamline the delivery of value. It helped me a lot when working on process improvement or automation initiatives (obviously). But it also helps when learning a new domain, or setting up a kanban board, or designing a service model.
2. Next goes the quality management. Surprisingly, understanding how to manage quality was a huge help as well even though I have never worked as a quality professional per se. Starting from quality planning all the way to quality control and testing, contributing to the end quality of the solution was highly appreciated by my team mates and managers.
3. Software development. This comes with a caveat: I’ve never worked as a professional software developer and truth be told I am pretty bad at it. However, understanding how it is done, what is involved, how technology works from the inside helped immensely on projects where I acted as a Business analyst or a Project manager.
4. Jira and Confluence — or any popular task tracking and knowledge management tool. The moment I’ve realised I can administrate and configure to my liking the tool we use for daily tasks I’ve dramatically improved my own and my teammates’ project experience. I’ve used this skill a lot to drive my own career. I always knew exactly how to make the desired delivery processes work in our environment or what the limitations and workarounds are.
Soft skills
1. Workshop facilitation. We spend enormous amount of time in meetings. The ability to make them fun and engaging while achieving expected outcomes is worth a fortune. Everybody loves a good facilitator and is more likely to show up to their meetings and give their best. Sometimes it takes as little as replacing boring slides and spreadsheets shared on the screen with a bit of collaboration. Sometimes it requires much more thought and preparation. Either way, running facilitated sessions is a number one soft skill on my list.
2. Listening and empathy. Walking in someone’s shoes to understand their point of view helps build relationships and avoid conflict. Applying empathy, you can better manage expectations and feel what is important to your stakeholders; thus building better transparency and trust in your project. Same skill helps define important attributes of your final solution and make prioritisation calls — from the point of view of the end user and customer.
3. Ability to train and coach others in a manner that doesn’t irritate them. Call it teaching skills if you like. Basically, this is when you can explain something new or complex to different audiences so they understand it better. E.g. training end users or preparing manuals for them, educating stakeholders on the new processes and tech, preparing materials for end users or upskilling your workshop participants on the new technique you are going to employ — there is a variety of use cases for this particular skill.
4. And last but not least, “systems thinking”. I put it inside inverted commas here because this term has a lot of meanings for different people and often comes with a lot of caveats. In this case, let’s call it as the ability to see the big picture and understand the “why” behind it, understand how the whole thing works. I could have called it holistic thinking, I guess. This way you can prioritise what is really important and cut the rest; get more important stuff done.
Actually, that last one is also worth a mention. Moreover, it may become the most crucial of them all — get stuff done. Probably the most important skill for any business analyst or project professional out there.
Want to learn more about business analysis directly from me or read my book? Explore the options ;)
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