How to get Business Analyst Jobs?
It’s not that easy to land a Business analyst job anymore. you need to understand the concept of business analysis & newer methodologies like scrum agile. If you don’t know, you can enroll in this course to enhance your odds and learn business analysis & scrum agile.
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I receive lots of questions on the business analyst jobs, so I have decided to share my experience in this post. I usually receive these questions through my course on business analysis & scrum agile or directly at linkedin.
But if you are looking for business analyst jobs or want to become a IT business analyst, everything mentioned in this post is applicable for you also.
Please note this post is not applicable for you if you are looking for business analytics or business intelligence jobs because they are entirely different fields and need entirely different set of skills.
This post is applicable for those who are looking to get into IT business analysis which is also referred as business system analysis, system analysis etc. So what is business analysis or a business analyst job. Let’s go through some of the most common responsibilities.
What is business analysis & Who is business analyst
Business analysis is process of enabling change in a organization. For example- a company like a bank or insurance company may decide to upgrade its processes and systems to deliver better customer service and user experience to its customers.
A business analyst will perform required analysis and help organization acheive its goal of desired change. Business analyst will work with all the stakeholders to elicit requirements, document them, perform gap analysis and develop solutions to upgrade the processes and systems.
If you go through business analyst jobs on job portals like naukri, glassdoor etc. You will find some common skill requirements like;
- Knowledge of domain is always a preferred requirement.
- Business analysis knowledge with certifications.
- Stakeholder management
- Knowledge of requirement elicitation techniques
- SDLC and agile methodology like Scrum
- Working knowledge of documents like business requirement document, user stories, product backlog etc.
- Scrum events like sprint review, retrospective, planning etc.
As a business analyst, your job will be to work as a intermediary between end users and development team, you should be very comfortable with requirement elicitation and how to communicate same to developers.
Role of business analyst
- Perform requirement gathering also known as requirement elicitation
- System or business process analysis
- Identify gaps
- Stakeholder management
- Solution design and development
- Writing business requirement documents (BRD)
- Writing user stories or business analysis documents with solution. Also known as DDD-detailed design document.
Please note these are high level details and individual business analyst roles and responsibilities may have additional elements but largely in same line.
Business analysis field is quite good and there are lots of job openings in the market. You can check naukri, monster or linkedin to get a sense of that. Also, don’t forget to check the business analyst job description for get more details about it.
In fact, always check roles & responsibilities because that’s how you learn about it. You need to see if you already possess these skills or need to acquire them. Please don’t apply to jobs if you don’t have desired skill set because if you are rejected, you won’t be able to reapply to same organization for some time.
At least most of the organizations have rules around that so better to be late than sorry.
Also, one pro tip, always perform company analysis before interview. When you know about the company, what they are selling or how they are selling, you can position yourself in a much better way. And try to get some information about interviewers so that you can do some research about them.
HR will probably share their details before interviews. So if you can find out their profile on Linkedin, you can go through their profile and check out their education and certification details.
It will tell you how closely you are linked to them in terms of education.
You can also review their job details to see what kind of roles & responsibilities you may have to perform. You can learn about them before interviews if you don’t know about them.
For example- if you know that your interviewer is working for a banking or insurance client, you can learn banking or insurance processes to improve your odds.
Similarly, try to find out any commonality in terms of interest like sports, movies etc. That could be a good ice breaker in the interview.
So always, perform company and interviewer analysis before any job interview.
To learn insurance business analyst’s domain questions, click here.
To test your business analysis & scrum knowledge, click here.
Business Analyst Qualifications
As far as business analyst qualifications are concerned, there are not set of guidelines. Various companies have different standards. Large IT companies prefer some experience in domain like insurance, banking etc. On the top of working experience in domains, they also prefer if you have any business analyst certification like CBAP, CCBA etc.
Please note that you need lots of business analysis experience to be eligible for CBAP so for freshers and job seekers, CCBA would be applicable. Nowadays, there are lots of colleges and universities offering business analyst courses, but they could be expensive and time consuming so check you budget and job placement records of the institution before enrolling in them.
If you are looking for short sweet course on business analysis and scrum agile, you can enroll in my course with 70% discount. Click here.
In my business analyst online training, I have tried to cover fundamentals of business analysis, requirement gathering techniques and scrum agile which is popular nowadays.
In fact, it’s even better if you have some understanding of scrum agile along with business analysis. You can simply search for scrum on any job portals and you will realize that it is very popular among employers. You can also watch this video
Business analyst jobs for laterals
for laterals, your experience is your biggest strength. Even if you have only 1 years of work experience, you need to promote that. If you have never worked as a business analyst, whether you are a fresher or lateral, your employers know that you don’t have any exposure to business analysis.
If you try to highlight business analysis as your strength, they will ask tough questions and you may end up not getting the offer.
Therefore, highlight your work experience, irrespective of the domain. If you don’t know about your current domain, first learn about that.
And then, try to learn business analysis or scrum.
It has been 40-50% domain knowledge, 40-30% BA & scrum knowledge and 20% rest like certifications etc.
If you come across someone who knows your current domain and also know fundamentals of business analysis and scrum, you significantly improve your chances of landing that job.
So remember, your experience is your friend. As far as business analyst jobs for freshers, you should focus on business analyst certifications & various business analyst course online.
So try to go for courses which are structured to offer you good information about the fields of business analysis & don’t consume too much of your time.
And yes, whether you are a fresher or lateral, you will need a mentor, someone with experience in business analysis, to coach you and help you with business analyst job interviews.
Please leave your comment if you have any question.
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