What are my options if I want to become a BA?
Landing your first role as a Business Analyst is perhaps the most difficult foundation yet to be achieve. This is because, once you have held down a job as a Business Analyst, the knowledge, experience and psychological sides of the puzzle all come together to work in your best interest.
A good question to ask yourself is ''Why is it so?''. Perhaps we should discuss what it really takes to achieve success in this field, and you can judge for yourself.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This case looks into the obstacles faced in trying to secure your first role as a Business Analyst, identifying and analyzing the verifiable issues, helping you to carry out your own personal Gap Analysis, identifying and evaluating the available and viable options which you could consider in support of your ambition to achieve a successful career transition. Finally, a recommendation is made based on the evaluation of all options.
The problem -Landing your first role
You must attend an interview during which you'll be asked a series of scenario-based questions. These questions are designed to test your knowledge and experience. You should know that interviewers aren't vague, based on your answers, most of them can certainly tell if you really have the experience or not. You should also know that whilst it is possible to be taught how to answer interview questions, it likely going to be the case that your answers will trigger other questions. It is only a matter of time until an impression is created. How you answer those questions will determine whether or not the impression is satisfactory or not.
The Solution - Proving your worth
To become successful, you must demonstrate valuable knowledge and experience based on the quality of answers you provide during an interview. This can only be possible when you actually have sufficient knowledge of a realistic project lifecycle. This is ways bigger than writing user stories and attending scrum ceremonies. In no particular order, here are some areas where you need to demonstrate proficiency on knowledge
- What you did in your last role - Project
- Managing stakeholders - Cite instances
- Your approach towards Testing and Training - cite instances
- Your role during implementation - Discuss tasks
- Functional decomposition of requirements
- Documentations - Mention documents created, when and why.
- What systems do you work on and what were your tasks
How do you bridge the gap
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| Option 1 - Certification and certification training | Option 2 - Most other trainers. | Option 3 - Our internship programme. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain Experience | No | No | Yes - Healthcare, Retail and Banking. |
| Premium Office Tools provided | N/A | Jira, Confluence | Jira, Confluence, Visio, Sharepoint, Ms Teams, Word, Excel, PPT, official email. |
| Software tools used for training | N/A | Random software such as CRM, web or mobile app. | PAS, EHR, SpeechRec - Healthcare, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, ServiceNow Retail domain. CBS software, KYC software, retail banking application, remittance application - Banking/fintech domain. up to 8 other legacy systems included for the most realistic experience. |
| Cost | Varies between £900 to £1900per certification (training + exam) | Varies from £500 to £3500 | from £299 to £498 per month - Duration; 3 months. |
Domain-based internship vs non-domain-based training.
Domain knowledge and experience is a single factor that will give you an unfair advantage over your competitors. Understanding a domain equips you with distinguished skills and knowledge in that area. For example, Retail organizations tend use Ticketing systems, CRMs and ERPs but not just any CRM or ERP. There are industry providers giants of such systems including ServiceNow, Salesforce and Dynamics 365.
These organizations will use these systems in addition to their existing legacy systems. You will find that projects are in form of integration or developing new functions to support existing systems. Our domain-based internship in retail will give you an opportunity to master how the E-comm application talks to the ERP, the CRM and the logistics fulfilment application. You'll gain an insight as to how products are managed digitally from sale until it is delivered. You will explore the logic and usecases involved in returns and customer care tickets and more. As such, you'll be able to write quality requirements/user stories which are linked to the improvements of any of the above systems, leading to either the development of new features or configuration of the existing system.
When compared to a non-domain-based training, you'll most likely learn how to define requirements/write user stories and participate in scrum activities. These are equally very valuable skills however; it lacks the official/operational effect which could actually mean a lot to an organization.