What does a business analyst do day to day in 2023? The basic responsibilities from role to
role tend to be the same but they can vary widely depending on what industry you're in,
what company you're in, or even different roles within the company can look different. So let's
look at some of the key responsibilities of a business analyst, the key skills that
you'll need to be a business analyst, and the common educational and work experience
background that a business analyst may have. I'm Jen and I help demystify analytic skills
and careers I've worked within the analytics space for over 15 years with many of those years as a
business analyst they're doing business analyst type activities if you want help breaking into a
business analyst career check out the description below for details about one-on-one coaching with
me now let's get into what a business analyst does first off business analyst
responsibilities the main focus of a business analyst is to analyze obviously the organization
processes procedures and data through a business specific lens they're specifically working on
different problems or challenges the business is facing and looking at total integration of a
solution they may not execute the full solution in the business but they're coming up with not
just what does the analysis say but how do we connect this into solving the problems we have a
pretty typical day for a business analyst involves meeting with stakeholders that might be in their
department or might be in other departments Gathering relevant data and information from
people and from systems performing analysis and then going back to stakeholders to share
their findings and look at how they might want to iterate again to streamline the processes they're
working on to come up with a more optimal solution and finally hand it over for implementation within
the organization let's get into business analyst skills because this also overlaps a lot with the
responsibilities business analysts are often working with people that they don't actually
have control over people that aren't reporting directly to them and they need to have a lot of
influence over these people communication skills are really important and especially influencing
skills persuasive skills influencing without Authority these are really important skills for
a business analyst to bring to the table business analysts still collect and extract information
regardless of the specific role every business analyst is going to have to gather data of
some sort to do their job whether this is actual numerical data or data around the process details
about processes they're working on or something else or a hybrid every business analyst role is
going to involve this need for data so not only do they need to collect the data they then need
to understand it make sure they're interpreting it correctly and then use it for whatever type
of analysis they might be doing because business analyst lists are collecting a lot of information
and data information management is a big piece of what they're doing sometimes that's managing
different requirements from stakeholders that they're working with and documenting
those sometimes it's documenting process flows sometimes it's managing different data sets
whether those are extracted from a system or come from something like a series of interviews
held with people in the organization regardless a good structured information management is very
important for a business analyst problem solving skills are at the heart of any Analyst job truly
how can you analyze things if you don't have some amount of problem solving knowledge for
a business analyst this looks like understanding how to write a good problem statement that is what
is the business problem they're actually trying to solve or what's the business question that they're
trying to answer in the work that they're going to do if you can't Define a good problem then
it's really hard to come up with a good solution because you can still solve a problem that you
you don't understand but your outcome or your recommendation may not really hold any weight
or meaning or really help the business in any way maybe you'll stumble into the right answer
on accident but it's really hard to implement a good solution without really understanding the
problem visualization is another common key skill for business analysts what does this mean it can
mean data visualization similar to what a data analyst would do using tools like power bi or
Tableau or click or one of the hundreds of other options that are out there but this visualization
could also look like process visualization doing process mapping it could look like wireframes if a
business analyst is working with it and software development processes Etc so visualization is a
key part of that activity of a business analyst and it's a really helpful way to communicate back
to those in the organization that they're working with lastly I'm going to throw Niche skills in
here and this is a really broad category of skills for a business analyst for a business
analyst that's looking to be more technical this could be things like a programming language maybe
they know how to write SQL queries or program in Python maybe it's specific knowledge of things
like crms customer relationship management tools like Salesforce having this specialty knowledge
while it can narrow down the types of roles that a business analyst is qualified for tend to make the
analysts that have those skills more qualified than others so you're niching down but you're
providing more expertise in the area that you do have those skills and that's really valuable
it tends to work out better for people searching for jobs when they do have something more unique
to bring to the table and aren't just generic broad skill sets that's not to say you can't
find roles that look more at that broad skill set there are certainly thousands upon thousands of
roles out there where people are only bringing a more generic skill set to the table but if
you're transitioning into a business analyst role perhaps from a different background the specialty
knowledge is something that you can leverage to make you more uniquely suited for specific roles
and that gets into the education and background of a business analyst there are business analysts or
business analytics degrees out there now Master's programs bachelor's programs that focus in this
area but these are all relatively new most of them have come about within the past 10 or so
years so while there are a lot more people out in the market now that have an educational background
as a business analyst it's somewhat atypical for people to have a specific degree in the field
rather if you're looking at a common educational background you might have people that have
backgrounds in mathematics statistics they might have backgrounds from more of a general business
perspective and they're looking at applying these skills to the analytics problems of the
organization a lot of times people transition into this role from other roles so you may come
from a background where you're problem solving in a specific area and you move into a business
analyst role sometimes data analysts transition into business analyst roles and vice versa there's
a lot of flexibility here because each role is a little bit unique so it's not that you have
to have a certain specific amount of programming language for instance like maybe you need for a
data analyst job you need more of those technical skills as a data analyst but there's a lot of
flexibility depending on the role I hope this has helped you understand what a business analyst does
and what their responsibilities are what kind of backgrounds they have again if you want one-on-one
Health mentorship with getting into a business analyst role or you're not quite sure if business
analyst is specifically the right career for you but you have an interest in analytics check
out the description for details on one-on-one mentorship with me thank you so much for watching