[Become a BA #7] How to Select a BA Training Program

If you’ve started to look into training options in business analysis, you might be feeling overwhelmed by the number of options available. You probably have a fixed amount of time and money to invest in training and even if your resources are not too limited, you probably don’t want to spend more time than you have to in training before actually getting started in your business analyst career.

The options can seem overwhelming. You might be asking the following questions:

• What’s really needed to become a BA?
• How do I sort through all of these options?
• Is expensive necessarily better?
• And what about a certificate—does that have value for my BA job search?

What follows is a series of checklists that you can use when evaluating BA training options. We’re breaking down the decisions and criteria. The idea is to help you define a list of criteria that you can use when evaluating a training program and feel confident about your choice.

Just a word of warning – this lesson contains A LOT of information. And to keep it all in perspective, at the end we’ll wrap all this up into a worksheet to guide you through the decision-making process. The worksheet will help you prioritize your training requirements and evaluate your options.

The most important question – answer it first

What do you envision happening as a result of you participating in a training program? What is the big goal that’s pushing you towards pursuing training in the first place?

One thing we learn very quickly as business analysts is that the more measurable and specific we can make our project goals, the easier it is to find the best possible solutions. The same thing holds true for our professional goals. So taking a bit of time to reflect on what it really is that you want before starting a training program will help you craft a plan that gets you from where you are to where you want to be.

Your answer could be:

• Find a new job with a core set of business analysis responsibilities.
• Create a business analyst role within my organization. And fill it!
• Create long-term career security by qualifying myself for a wide variety of business analyst jobs.
• Become recognized by my manager or colleagues as a business analysis professional, by earning a title change, a promotion, or an updated job description accurately describing my business analysis responsibilities.

The answer to this question is yours and yours alone. I just give you these answers as suggestions because they are the most common career goals I hear from those professionals actively seeking to become business analysts.

If you are not quite sure, join us for  My Business Analysis Career Choice where we’ll help you map out your career change before investing in expensive training.

Finding the most direct route from here to there

Once you’ve identified your primary goal, you’ll need to determine what you need to learn or do to make that goal a reality.

Here’s a list of fairly common learning objectives for professionals pursuing the above goals.

• Be able to define and describe the fundamental techniques of business analysis.
• Be able to talk the BA talk.
• Identify past experiences that are relevant to your business analysis career transition.
• Identify the most important “soft skills” or underlying BA competencies that you bring to business analysis.
• Identify the relative value of your professional qualifications, experiences, and competencies given your career goals.
• Be able to distinguish between the types of business analyst roles that are available and make an informed choice about the path to pursue as part of your career planning.
• Be able to strongly position yourself in the BA job market, crafting a strong resume that helps you obtain interviews and presenting your qualifications appropriately in interviews.
• Create a professional development plan to fill any remaining competency gaps that might prevent you from achieving your career goals.

This list might contain items you’ve never thought of before. You might want to read through the list a few times and consider carefully whether each learning objective will help you achieve your career goal. In the worksheet provided below, you’ll prioritize these learning objectives and be able to add additional ones as well.

But wait, what about this??

Even with these learning objectives defined, you might still have some questions about them. Here are answers to some of the most frequent ones. (And if you have more, please get in touch!)

How deep do I need to learn about business analysis?

When you are making a career transition, you need to get less deep than you might assume. The challenge is, as we learned in lesson 3, there are just so many skills that can help you become a BA. It’s unreasonable to expect yourself to become an expert in every one of those skills before getting started. (Yes, you can breathe a deep sigh of relief if you’d like right now.)

Instead, what seems to work best is for potential BAs to get a broad understanding of business analysis and identify the strengths they bring to the career based on their past experiences and, often, what they’ve done because they have good BA instincts. Then formal training can help plug small gaps in knowledge and transform an informal experience into a formal understanding of how to do a specific aspect of business analysis really well.

So, I don’t suggest you go deep into all the techniques until you have a solid grounding of the whole picture first. Your career development doesn’t end with your first BA job, so there will always be time to fill additional knowledge gaps and learn more about business analysis.

The second most important question

How do you learn best? There are a wide variety of formats available. You can learn about business analysis everywhere from reading books to attending university classes to participating in online training programs. The decision you make here might largely depend on your time and monetary resources, as there is a wide range of costs and it typically varies most by format.

But you’ll also do well to consider how you learn best and find a program that supports your learning style. If you don’t know much about how you learn, you might check out these free online assessments.

• Edutopia Learning Style Quiz
• LD Pride Learning Styles Self-assessment
• Learn More Indiana Learning-style Assessment

Use your learning style to develop a feature list

When it comes to training options, there are many available. We could look at the pros and cons of each option. But then I’d run the risk of embedding my personal learning preferences and biases into the mix. Instead, I’ll run through a list of the features a typical training program might have. And you’ll have the opportunity to do a bit of business analysis by weighing the value of each feature to you, your career goals, and your learning style.

The checklist you can download at the end of this lesson supports you customizing this list by adding your own priorities and then using it to compare different options as you make your decision.

Instructor-Led

Most training programs are instructor-led. This means that you have access to one or more instructors as part of the course. They establish a pace for the course and deliver the materials live, whether in-person or via a web-based interactive tool. Some lower cost virtual options are not instructor-led. They are available on-demand and offer pre-recorded lessons.

Ongoing Access to Lessons

Once you’ve attended the initial lesson, are you able to go back through the materials or will you need to rely on handouts and notes? The advantage of some virtual options is that they provide limited, ongoing, or lifetime access to the lessons, enabling you to go back as needed and revisit the materials.

Instructor Access

Oftentimes all of our questions are not answered “in class” and it can be helpful to have access to instructors outside of class time when you get stuck trying to apply some aspect of what you learned. Instructor access might be provided in the form of office hours, phone support, email support, Q&A sessions, or online forums.

Reinforcement of Learning

As adults we do not learn very well by simply sitting in a classroom. We need to apply what we learned to cement new ideas. Reinforcement can happen via online quizzes, interactive exercises, homework, next action worksheets, and practice work.

Project Work

A strong way of reinforcing learning is by working on a real or simulated project. Some university programs offer students the opportunity to connect with local businesses and perform volunteer work to handle a small project as a BA or team of BAs. These have real value in that you are practicing your skills in a real-world environment, with real stakeholders and real issues.

Other programs offer simulated projects where a case study is provided and you work through sample deliverables based on those materials. These are a great reinforcement tool in terms of learning the techniques, but not as valuable from a real-world experience perspective. You might consider whether or not the project is “real enough” that you could put it on your resume and talk about it in an interview.

Meet and Collaborate with Other Students

Students who have gone through the same course, program, or material together often develop a sense of camaraderie. They have set of shared experiences and learnings. They may become close collaborators throughout their career journey, helping each other with future on-the-job challenges or job searches. Courses offered in a live classroom setting often offer the most opportunities for building relationships with peers, but don’t overlook the online interaction available through ongoing access to forums. Deep relationships are not likely to develop in a few days time, so if this is an important feature for you, look for programs that support continued contact with other students.

Support from Real-World Practitioners

It’s no secret that the longer you are not active as a business analyst, the more distant you become from the real-world challenges business analysts face. University instructors who have been in academia for a long-time might have a deep understanding of the tools and techniques but may not be able to help you apply them in a real-world setting.

We’ve all had that experience where someone “throws the book at us” and we look at them in disbelief for their apparent disregard for what’s “really going on.” Instructors with recent and practical real-world experience know that techniques and templates rarely solve problems perfectly and the ability to improvise and respond to new information is often your greatest strength. Consider access to real-world practioners as part of your training.

PDs for IIBA^® Certification

If pursuing either the CBAP^® or CCBA™ certification is something you are considering, then it you might want to select a program that will qualify for Professional Development credits (PDs). You’ll need 21 PDs to apply for either of these professional certifications. Believe it or not, most BA training programs will qualify for PDs, regardless of whether or not they advertise this fact. If the provider is an EEP™ (see below) their endorsed courses will automatically qualify. But if they are not an EEP (and many reputable providers are not) then you simply need to do a bit more work to ensure the course material aligns with the BABOK^®. If you can spell this out as part of listing this course on your application, then it’s likely the course will count.

IIBA Endorsed Education Provider (EEP)

An EEP provider pays a fee to IIBA to evaluate and endorse its materials for a specific course. IIBA reviews the materials to ensure that they are aligned with the knowledge areas in the BABOK. Courses endorsed through this program are guaranteed to provide PDs for certification. IIBA does not, however, perform a quality assessment of the materials. If you use these checklists to assess potential training options, you could safely choose a non-EEP program as the results of your analysis will be deeper than the EEP program provides.

Certificates

Certificates are typically handed out by training organizations or academic institutions and they represent the completion of a body of academic material. They may represent that you’ve taken a course, a collection of courses, participated in class, submitted your homework, and/or verify that you have passed an exam that covers the course material. Very rarely (or never) will you see any job posting requiring a specific certificate, except perhaps if you are applying for a job from the company that offers the certificate. You might see positions that ask for formal training in business analysis, in which case your certificate is a representation of that (but so is your participation in a course that does not offer a certificate).

In contrast to certificates are professional certifications. These are typically provided by third party professional bodies, not training companies. The two that are most relevant to us as business analysts are those offered by IIBA – the CCBA and the CBAP. Unlike certificates, certifications represent you have relevant professional experience and the understanding of a body of knowledge, in this case the BABOK.

Most BAs I’ve spoken to about certificates do not report that these really helped open many doors for them in finding their first BA job. Of course, many training companies will tell you they do, but you need to look at their underlying motivations. Certificates are expensive and they need to justify the cost. Because again, the value of the certificate is limited by the reputation of the training company and it represents you have book knowledge but it does not really close that experience gap.

Accountability

Are you the type of person who needs someone to hold you accountable for your learning? Do homework assignments and graded work inspire you to do your best work? If so, then self-directed programs are probably not a good choice for you.

Schedule

When you are pursuing training, some aspect of your schedule needs to become more flexible. You need to invest the time to make the most of the opportunity.  A fixed classroom or virtual schedule can mean that you need to plan your work and/or home commitments around the class schedule. Many virtual programs offer on-demand access where you can participate at different times each week, depending on what works best for you. Again, if you need accountability, a fixed schedule might work best. But if you have a chaotic schedule and you think you might miss classes, a virtual program can provide a way to squeeze in learning on your schedule instead.

What else?

Go back to your primary goal and learning objectives. What support do you need to ensure you can meet your goals? You may indeed find a few additional features to add to this list. In the worksheet, you’ll have the opportunity to add additional features.

Your Next Step

This is a lot of information and the decision you make will not necessarily be easy. But a well informed decision will free up the mental energy you need to focus on learning the most you can from the course, rather than second-guessing your decision.

Click here to download a worksheet that will help you prioritize each of these elements and compare different training options.

If you have any questions as you work through this lesson, please get in touch or post them to the LinkedIn group.

Additional Bridging the Gap Resources

• How to Accumulate Knowledge in Business Analysis Without a Big Training Budget (video)
• What’s the best certificate to start a BA career?
• I want to become a business analyst, what training do I need?

As always, wishing you the best in business analysis.

Best,

Laura Brandenburg, CBAP

• Your Host, Bridging the Gap
• Your Instructor, My Business Analysis Career

**Interested in learning more? Check out My Business Analysis Career Choice, a virtual, instructor-led course designed to help you map out your business analysis career change.

***Get here from a link from a friend, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter? This lesson is part 7 of an 8-part free email course on becoming a business analyst. Learn more about it and sign up here.