Does a Business Analyst need to be able to juggle and breathe fire at the same time? Are Microsoft Office and Visio that important to know? Who needs Business Process Models and SQL Queries anyways? If you can change a flat tire in 30 seconds, you’re the man for the job, right?
Business analytics is a growing field in today’s times. The need for business analyst professionals is on the rise across the world. There are a set of skills that you must possess for becoming a business analyst. Having all the required skills will open new ventures and help you grow as a successful business analyst. This article will precisely help you understand all the skills needed to grab a job in this popular field.
Let’s find out what skills a Business Analyst needs to be successful in the workplace.
Business Analysts
Business analysts play an important role in many organizations. They analyze data and provide solutions for many IT-related problems. Business analysts have many opportunities to grow and gain skills within their careers. They can earn different certifications and training that help them to grow.
Getting a relevant certificate within your domain helps to solidify your knowledge and skills. It also helps you to stand out from other candidates. Employers often prefer certified professionals over uncertified candidates.
BA works to improve the processes of a company. They bridge the gap between IT and the business structure. Business analyst aims to improve the software, services, and products processes. These are the processes that the company uses or offers.
Business analysts test the IT-related needs of a company. They also provide solutions that make a business system strong. To perform these tasks, BA uses data analytics. For instance, a BA identifies the IT needs of an organization and provides IT solutions to meet those needs.
These Are The Top Technical Skills That Business Analysts Must Have
1. Technology
Be one with technology. If you hate computers, but love noodling for catfish, now is your time to jump ship.
Extensive knowledge of the IT industry is a must for this position. You must stay up to date on industry developments. You must have the ability to analyze the capabilities of tools and technologies. It is crucial to succeeding as a business analyst in this era.
Depending on the exact title of your position. There are specific technical computer skills and certificates that you must go for.
Some of these are:
- Microsoft Office
- Microsoft Visio
- Software Design Tools
- SQL Queries
- Business Process Models
- Many other programs
2. Microsoft Excel
Excel is one of the oldest and strongest analytics and reporting tools. BAs use it to perform several calculations, data, and budget analyses. It helps to unravel business patterns. They summarize data by creating pivot tables. They make different charts using Excel. In this way, they can generate dynamic reports related to a business problem.
Excel is used to:
- Create revenue growth models for new products based on recent customer forecasts.
- Plan an editorial calendar.
- List expenses for products.
- Create charts to show how close the product is to budget across each category.
Business analysts use Excel to calculate customer discounts. They are based on monthly purchase volume by product. They even summarize customer revenue by product. It helps them to find areas where there is a need to build stronger customer relationships.
3. Use Cases
Use cases are a textual description of how a business user or a user of a software application interacts with a software system. They force you to get specific about what function or feature that system needs to have to meet the business needs. Underlying that feature is often a piece of code that a developer has created, customized, or integrated to make that function work.
But what you need to be able to specify as a business analyst is what that software needs to do, and the condition under which it needs to do it. A use case is a perfect model to get familiar with that business user-system interaction. It’s much more detailed than a typical business process model, and it’s much more specific. You get into those specific technical requirements even though you don’t know how to write the code that underlies it.
4. Documentation and Presentation
A BA should document their project teachings and results well, clearly, and concisely. They should confidently present their project findings and outcomes. Especially in front of the stakeholders and clients.
With the help of organized documentation, BAs can communicate technical concepts easily to non-technical employees. Jotting down project lessons is vital, as this will help them make better decisions in the future.
Later, if similar problems crop up, BAs can use the previous solutions. Thereby saving time and preventing unwanted issues.
5. Research and Destroy
So, if the massive amount of technical knowledge required to be a successful BA hasn’t deterred you yet. I hope you are ready for some investigating.
You must research every corner of the Internet when beginning a new project. As if you lost one of your favorite, lucky socks and you can’t stop until you find it.
Research is the first step in forming a final solution to your company’s problem. It’s the gathering of the information and statistical data needed to form a solution.
Using your IT and technological skills. You have to be able to gather accurate information and analyze it daily. You’ve to provide high-quality and detailed requirements to everyone involved in the project. Meaning if anyone has questions, your detailed research must be able to answer them.
6. Programming Languages
To perform data analytics well, BAs should have proper knowledge of programming. They must know R and Python to solve complex problems through writing effective codes.
In addition to it, you should also have an understanding of statistical software such as SPSS and SAS. You can analyze a huge amount of data with the help of the above programming languages. You can also create business models to make business predictions.
7. Wireframes
Wireframes are visual descriptions, or visual renderings, of a user interface screen. Essentially, when I go to a software application as a user, what does it look like to me?
Not, specifically, what are the colors, what are the buttons, and how are they; circle or square? That is important at a certain point of a project, but a wireframe can be much less specific than that. It can use general buttons and not be specific on colors. Use grayscale. You’re trying to show this is what the user interface screen might look like to a potential user.
Again, you’re getting to that level of detail. What that software system needs to be able to do and look like, again, without having to write the code behind it. There are a lot of tools today that people who don’t have coding backgrounds can use. You only drag and drop those features into a wireframing tool. In this way, you can create them without having to know how to code.
8. Creating Dashboards And Reports
Business Analysts must know how to use different BI tools to create dashboards and reports. These reports and dashboards help the upper management to make decisions. They may need knowledge of Power BI, Tableau, and QlikView to make reports based on the company’s needs.
9. Data Models for Data Requirements
Data models are:
- Entity-relationship diagrams
- System context diagrams
- Data flow diagrams
- Data dictionaries.
There are a bunch of different models included in the data modeling area.
Essentially, all those models allow you to understand:
- How the database is structured?
- How information is stored?
- What information needs to be stored?
So, if you’re looking at a business process. There are different fields on a form coming in through some sort of input:
- How is that information stored in your software system?
- What are the rules that need to be applied when that information is stored?
- How do the different pieces of information that come in through different business processes relate together?
Different data models allow you to look at that information model in different ways. This is how you, essentially, learn how to model a relational database or express data requirements without knowing SQL.
10. SQL And Database
BAs need to work with the structured data of the organization. They should know about databases like MySQL, Microsoft SQL, NoSQL, and Oracle DB. These databases help BAs to store and process huge amounts of data.
Every business analyst must carry the hands-on experience with SQL. This will help them access, retrieve, manipulate, and analyze data. They must write data definition and data manipulation commands like create, delete, select, update, insert, etc.
Why Choose Wolf Careers Inc. For A Business Analyst Training
Do you want to work with project teams and manage product development or needs? Or do you want to work as a program or project manager? If yes, then Business Analyst Training is the best certification you can get.
You can join Wolf Careers Inc. to learn the technical and soft skills of BA. Wolf Careers Inc. offers the best-certified business analyst training program. This certification provides a comprehensive introduction to big data analytics. It is designed for all business professionals including the ones who don’t have any prior experience.
Throughout the course, you will learn how data analytics inform, predict and describe business descriptions in the area of:
- Marketing
- Finance
- Human Resources
- Operations
You will also develop an analytical mindset and basic data literacy. It will assist you in making strategic decisions using data. Upon completion, you will be able to use your skills and interpret the real-world data. You will be able to make adequate recommendations for business strategy.
