Business Analyst falls under the category of jobs that requires a lot of focus, learning ability, willpower, good communication, team management, creativity, and the ability to work under pressure. He also documents business processes by integrating their business models with technology.
From an abstract point of view, a Business Analysts should be proficient in both technical and non-technical skills. You can learn these skills by taking some courses and work on different projects. A dedicated course of business analysis will help you understand the ins and outs of various business processes. Likewise, you can take the Business Analyst Course that’ll help you learn the essential skills and work on projects based on the current business trends.
Now, let’s go through the list of top 10 skills that you should have in your bag to kick-start your career as a Business Analyst:
Technical Skills
Below are the key technical skills required to become a Business Analyst:
1. Technology
A Business Analyst(BA) should have extensive knowledge of various technologies like Cloud computing, Data Science, Machine Learning, etc. Also, it’s essential to stay up to date with the latest technological developments going on in the industry. BA professionals should be able to connect with both On-promises and On-cloud such as spreadsheets, CSV files, SQL Servers, OLAP, etc. So, it’s important to have sound knowledge of database and query languages like MySQL.
Business Analysts must be comfortable using Microsoft Office, Vision, software design tools, process models, Machine Learning frameworks, Tableau, SQL Server, various programming languages, data modeling software, and other programs.
2. Research
With every project, a Business Analyst has to search on the internet and gather information about the solution and the process to achieve it. It helps both ANalyst and the company to understand the technological requirements, the time required, and the problems associated with the project.
You should learn about them and become an expert about the issue before assigning the tasks to your team members. Moreover, it’s important to investigate the risks associated with the problems and the limitations of your solution.
3. Data Review and Statistical Analysis
Companies gather a lot of data through applications, feedback forms, transactions, logs, and more. This ocean of numbers if analyzed carefully can tell a lot about a company’s revenue, product performance, sales, customer satisfaction, team performance, productivity, and future trends. Data Review and Analysis is the most important and time-consuming process that Business Analysts have to go through. This involves data gathering, building statistical models, data transformation, removing redundancies, training models, and doing statistical analysis.
To carry out these tasks, a Business Analyst needs to be an expert in Machine Learning, Data Science, Statistics, Data Modeling, etc. The whole process of making sense of the statistics you’ve performed goes something like this:
- Conduct research for the given problem
- Gather data and connect with different data sources
- Perform Data Review and transformation
- Analyze the data and discover hidden patterns
- Find out the best solution for the problem
4. Financial Planning
It’s important for a Business Analyst to conduct detailed research and estimate how everything including the resources, software tools, and time is going to cost the company for the given project. It also helps a business determine if a business can achieve the goals of the project on a fixed budget. The main aim for estimating the cost of a project is to keep the clients and stakeholders in profit.
5. Documentation
Documentation is required to record the progress of your business solution. From creation to implementation, documentation helps a business to understand the plan of action and get the details of each step of your project. In addition, Analysts create organized documentation to the technical concepts and show data visualizations to non-technical users and other business members.
Non-technical Skills
Following are some of the important non-technical skills required to become a successful Business Analyst:
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6. Decision Making
The decisions taken by Business Analyst would have a direct impact on the entire and team, which may cause a huge loss to the company. Therefore, companies don’t want a second-best solution as you miscalculated or forgot to include nuances of the problem. You should not feel hasty while making those decisions as it could be a disaster for both ht project team and the company.
7. Problem Solving
Every day you’ll encounter new problems related to workspace, co-workers, data gathering, connectivity, modeling, and more. So, you need to be creative and ready to adopt new solutions that work best for you and your team. Before jumping into the implementation, you should understand the problem is, its cause, how it’s going to affect the project, and find the potential solutions for it.
8. Managerial Skills
Managerial skills will help you lead your project team and assign the right tasks to the right person. Also, it’s important to know the strength and weaknesses of your team members and motivate them to produce better results, because it’s your responsibility to make sure that the project is completed on time.
9. Communication
Business Analysts should have great communication skills as they have to spend plenty of time with co-workers, developers, managers, and clients to understand their requirements. Good communication between your clients will increase their trust in your company and also help what the results should look like. Moreover, you have to explain the results in a way that even a non-technical person can understand the nuances of the problem and its effects on the project.
10. Negotiation
Last but not least, negotiation skills will help you communicate with different people and convince them to perform a specific task. Your negotiation skills will help you convince the team members and clients to implement your solution. In other words, you should people person.
Conclusion
Business Analysts play a key role in various business scenarios as they generate actionable insights by transforming raw business data into actionable insights. This helps the stakeholders and decision-makers to understand the nuances that have an impact on various prospects of the organization.