Decision-making and policy formulation in the business world often involve very high stakes and are therefore incredibly intricate. Thus, business professionals today are expected to be highly analytical and good at critical thinking to be able to make the right decisions at the right time.
Hence, it’s not a surprise that interview rounds for most business roles such as business managers or business analysts involve analytical aptitude tests. Making it as a business analyst in 2022 would therefore require you to have high levels of analytical skills.
If you are interested in a business analyst career, it is important for you to know what kind of analytical skills are required of a business analyst.
What is a business analyst and what do they do?
If you’ve ever wondered ‘what does a business analyst do’, here’s the answer.
The primary role of a business analyst is to assess different aspects of a business to identify key risks and devise ways to mitigate them. Most business analyst roles are also collaborative in nature, i.e., they require you to work with multiple departments such as IT, sales and marketing and operations.
A business analyst might be tasked with increasing the operational efficiency of a single department or the organisation as a whole. They assess business data to find out patterns and anomalies and present their findings in the form of business insights.
Here are some of the key roles and responsibilities associated with a business analyst role:
- Dealing with business forecasting and budgeting issues
- Designing enterprise architectural models
- Understanding business strategies and their efficacies
- Creating financial models to calculate the impact of different business strategies
- Engaging in business data visualisation through charts and tables
Why does a business analyst need analytical skills?
Analytical skills are very important for business analysts since they enable them to identify business risks and issues. Skills like critical thinking and mathematical aptitude also enable business analysts to map enormous amounts of business data within a limited time.
Business analysts are primarily involved with increasing the efficiency of different business tasks and operations. Strong analytical skills can help them discharge their duties with accuracy and within set timelines.
What are the top business analyst skills you need to be a successful analyst in 2022?
A business analyst career will allow you to increase your organisation’s success using your analytical skills. Your career can allow you to work independently, ask intelligent questions, and solve important business problems.
Business analytical skills are usually an amalgam of technical and analytical skills that allow a business analyst to do their job. Here are the primary business analyst skills that are expected of business intelligence professionals today:
- Ability to understand the essence of a business objective
- Critical thinking
- Communication and interpersonal skills
- Negotiation and cost-benefit analytical skills
- Decision-making skills
- Technical expertise in programming languages
- Business acumen
How to improve analytical skills for a business analyst role?
The question, “How to become a business analyst” does not have a single answer.
Irrespective of the domain you are interested in, becoming a business analyst can require you to put in tremendous effort to sustain the intense competition. Some of the ways you can improve your business analyst skills include:
- Completing a relevant business analytics programme.
- Shadowing existing business analysts in their work.
- Pursuing different business analyst certifications like IIBA Entry Certificate in Business Analysis (ECBA) and PMI Professional in Business Analytics (PMI-PBA).
- Beginning with an entry level role where the stakes are lower and your mistakes aren’t likely to cost the organisation a lot of money.
How can a business analysis programme improve your analytical skills?
A comprehensive business analytics programme can help you dip your toes in the pool of business analytics. It can prepare you to work with industry BA tools like Tableau and MySQL, and help you understand the significance of different analytical methods and techniques.
IBAT College Dublin offers a great Diploma in Business Analysis and Transformation programme which can be relevant here. This programme can help you explore complex business situations and analyse them for their associated risks.
The course can also give you an in-depth understanding of business analytics concepts and introduce you to the analytical methods, tools and documentation that’s common in the industry.
Click here to enrol in this industry-relevant diploma in business analysis at IBAT College Dublin today.
This article was written by Sweha Hazari.