Role-In-Review: Business Analyst

IT Role-in-Review - Business Analyst

Learn about the top skills and competencies companies look for when searching for a Business Analyst.

​Welcome to our Role-In-Review series. If you are in the Information Technology (IT) industry, you are probably aware of the high number of existing IT roles and how quickly new IT roles are entering the job market to keep up with the ever-changing IT industry demand for talent. Specializing in IT, IT Career Transformation has helped improve career documents (resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn/Social Media profiles) for IT professionals and leaders from over sixty different IT roles with different areas of specialties. We continuously analyze relevant job descriptions to identify critical and highly ranked keywords and skills, allowing us to excel at crafting outstanding career documents using relevant keywords for each IT role and specialty areas.

​Our goal in this Role-In-Review series is to provide you with an insight to a specific IT role and useful content recommendations driven by IT industry demand that you can use to optimize your career documents and help keep them up-to-date. The first article in this series focuses on the Business Analyst role. Continue reading to find out what are the top competencies, capabilities and skills companies look for when searching for a Business Analyst.

Role in Review – Business Analyst

⇒ Role Description: what would a Business Analyst normally do? How do they support technology projects and what value do they create?

A Business Analyst plays a key role in planning and delivering technology projects. They connect business with technology teams; ensure clarity, completeness, and traceability of project requirements. In collaboration with projects’ stakeholders (clients, business and technical teams), they analyze and streamline business/operational processes, document business needs/requirements and pain points, and they define/create project documentation including process diagrams, system requirements, user cases/stories.

⇒ What are the business/technology areas and type of projects a business analyst can support? The following are just a few high demand specialty areas business analysts we have worked with in 2022 possess.

• Enterprise Applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and specific industry/line of business applications such as financial applications, supply chain, Warehouse Management System (WMS) applications.
  
• Technology domains such as system integration/API driven solutions, web and mobile based applications and Cloud Migrations.

Optimizing your career documents using the right content and keywords is critical to successfully pass-through Applicant Tracking System (ATS) screening. It also helps improve your ranking in search results, and for evaluation done by recruiters and hiring managers to identify top candidates for your target role. The more you use each of the keywords/specific areas of specialty, the better chance you have of your resume capturing hiring managers’ attention.

​⇒ What are the top competencies hiring companies look for? At IT Career Transformation, we develop a Target Role Analysis for our clients’ targeted IT roles to identify the appropriate keywords and competencies. It is essential that keywords and core competencies are included as many times as possible throughout all career documents. You can include these in your Introduction, Key Areas of Expertise/Competencies and Professional Experience sections. This highlights what sets you apart from other candidates and the unique value you can bring to hiring companies. Here are the top ten core competencies hiring companies look for in a Business Analyst:

IT Career Transformation Role-In-Review - Business Analyst top ten core competencies

​Specific areas of specialty depend on the hiring company’s particular industry and technology environments. Your career documents should contain specialties you possess and are relevant to your target role. Here are some examples of specialty areas in high demand:

IT Career Transformation Role-In-Review - Business Analyst specialty area examples

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⇒ Don’t forget to include your soft skills. In today’s competitive job market, companies are looking for the right soft skills in all IT roles. It is essential to include those interpersonal/leadership skills in which you excel throughout all of your career documents. Again, the more often they are included, the better your chances of standing out from the crowd. Include terminology such as time management, adaptable and self-motivated. Here are a few more examples of soft skills recruiters and hiring managers look for in a Business Analyst: 
Ability to Drive Change and Influence Stakeholders | Problem Resolution | Analytical Thinker | Verbal/Written/Interpersonal Communication | Effective Leadership and Team Building.

⇒ What type of desired capabilities, professional experience and accomplishments are hiring companies looking for when searching for a Business Analyst. Most often, these are included in the “Responsibilities” or “What you will do” sections of the job description. Here are few examples of Business Analyst desired capabilities in high demand: 

• Analyze current processes/operational data to understand/document existing state, identify pain points and business needs and provide improvement recommendations.
• Facilitate requirements gathering sessions with business stakeholders and users to define business requirements, create effective use cases, user stories, and dataflow/workflow diagrams.

It is essential to write accomplishment statements in a form of “action—impact—results,” highlighting the value you created to your employer or customers, ideally providing tangible results (numbers) from your projects. Here is an example of an optimized accomplishment statement:

Successfully implemented a SaaS based Contract Management System (including Salesforce integration) for a leading law firm. Performed needs analysis, developed workflows and user stories, defined technical integration requirements and supported data migration, resulting in 40% reduction in data entry errors and an annual cost savings of $250K.

​⇒ What are the technical skills hiring companies look for when searching for a Business Analyst? This depends on the business, technology stack and development environment (Agile/Waterfall) the hiring company uses. Here are some of the software skills often desired for a Business Analyst:
​Microsoft Word (for requirements documentation); Excel, Power BI and Tableau (for data analysis and data visualization); Visio (for creating process flow diagrams); and JIRA (for creating user stories and other issue types.)
 

We hope this review provides useful recommendations for you to use and share with your friends when optimizing career documents.

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IT Career Transformation is devoted to helping IT professionals and leaders advance their career. We work with IT professionals from entry level to senior management and all types of IT roles to create the Optimum IT Professional Resume, Cover Letter and LinkedIn Profile, optimized with keywords relevant to the target IT role and specialty areas.  We provide specialized career development services that help IT professionals stand out from the crowd and find their target IT job /project faster.

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Do you need help optimizing your resume to your target IT role?
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Visit us at https://www.itcareertransformation.com/ for more information and to schedule your free initial consultation.

www.itcareertransformation.com | (470) 210-7955 | [email protected]

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