Business Analyst role is the challenging role which requires some special skill sets. There is no course so far which teaches you the responsibilities which a BA would do.
Business Analyst role is offered to those people who possess those skill sets which they get exposed in their profession. I will explain this by giving examples.
1. Developer - A Fresh college passout gets his first job in some MNC . He is being taught some development language and is put in some client project. However for any developer to move in to a BA role either needs good domain knowledge along with responsibilites played by BA. However the shortfall which is see here is that a developer is exposed only to certain portion of the application/product/ in the project as his focus is more on development. He is not aware about the other features on that application.
Advice:: Developers/Application Programmers are adviced to do a little bit of homework in this , stay in the project for around 2 years, get exposed to the requirements, put some extra effort in going throug Functional specificationss, business specifications , do some testing to explore the application and learn from your peers and existing BA's and most important things is to get exposed to BA responsibilities.
2. QA - QA specialist is one person who has a very good chance to move into Business Analyst role, infact whenever a candidate who gets recruited from B-school for BA position is being exposed to do Testing initially so that he/she understand the product/application and mapping the functional docs with the application.
Advice:: QA's needs to learn perparing test scripts, test plans, client interaction and try to move into BA role with solid domain and application understanding.
For Developres/QA's would suggest to do some certifications to gain theoritical understanding of domain.
3. MBA's - Professionals from diversified industries stand a good chance as they bring the domain experience along with them. For example a fresh MBA student joins a bank works for 2-3 years gets exposed to banking operations like deposits, loans etc. It makes sense for the IT companies to recruit him and require very less effort in grooming him.
Advice :: professionals with experience are encourage to learn the best practices of requirement gathering, learn testing concepts ,preparing test plans, gap analysis etc.
Fresh MBA's - will need to put in lot of efforts and the co. would take their time to put in to actual BA role. Mean while would suggest you to follow the same advice as i gave for professionals and do some certifications to make your candidature strong for BA Role.
Also Read :: Role of a Business Analyst
Readers are encouraged to raise their queries, concerns and comments on the same .
There problem is that "Business Analyst" is a title which can be used to mean just about anything. In some places it's used to mean the very specific role of liaising with the business, documenting requirements, etc. But in a lot of places it seems to mean "just about anything with excel that the Project Manager can't be bothered to do". It's important you know which of those two roles you are aiming for!
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