[Become a BA #2] Your Natural BA Talents

In today’s lesson I’m going to give you a key that will help you unlock your door to business analysis.

The Yin Yang of Business Analysis

During the interview I conducted with Ellen Gottesdiener, she mentioned the tension between hard skills and soft skills. She called this the yin and the yang of business analysis. Others call it the art and science. It doesn’t quite matter what you call it. Understanding the concept will help you find your path into business analysis that leverages your natural talents.

The technical skills of business analysis are techniques and deliverables. Elicitation techniques such as interviewing, analysis models such as use cases, and specification documents such as BRDs are common technical skills. They are the science or discipline of being a BA. If you are naturally strong at analysis and problem solving, you can often quickly learn how to create a model or a specification. It’s not creating the spec that’s the difficult part, it’s discovering the information to put into the spec and ensuring it’s complete that’s the hard part.

That leads us to the soft skills. These are how you do business analysis. How well do you communicate? How strong are your relationships with stakeholders? How good are you at problem solving? Do you root out information? Do you see what’s missing from the puzzle when there’s no box? These are the underlying competencies of what it takes to be a solid BA. It’s likely that you are already strong in one or more of these areas.

The Misleading Surface of Business Analysis

On the surface business analysis might look like it’s about writing specifications and creating models. In reality this is the easy part. It’s easily teachable which is why you find so many people teaching it. The art of how to do great business analysis is harder to teach and harder to learn. You can’t learn it sitting in a classroom. You can practice the technical skills but without a real stakeholder environment, it’s just practice. Until your professional credibility is on the line and you are dealing with an evasive stakeholder, a misinformed sponsor, and a stubborn developer, and you need to rely on your soft skills to create a positive outcome from a challenging situation, you are just practicing the techniques of business analysis.

And those professionals who create fulfilling business analyst careers don’t just enjoy creating technical documents. They are motivated to jump into messy problem-solving activities, wade through the complexities created by the people involved in the project, and find intrinsically good solutions that are accepted by everyone involved.

The Secret (shhh…)

Now, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. This is why, if you have all the soft skills and even training in the technical skills but little of the real-world experience, you are finding it difficult to convince most hiring managers that you can do the job. They want to hear about your experience succeeding as a business analyst. They want to see evidence you have the Yin Yang, or, at least, that you have succeeded in the kinds of situations a business analyst faces day-to-day.

The key to unlocking your entry into business analysis is to focus on both the Yin and the Yang and, most importantly, to bring them both together in your work experience.

I’m starting to get ahead of myself, but I just don’t want to leave you hanging. The thing is that you can build relevant experiences whether or not you are officially a business analyst today.  And the truth is that you might already have these experiences but not yet appreciate the value of them in the context of your career change. Re-read these last two sentences because either one or both could contain your key into the business analysis profession.

Your next step

I’m guessing that you didn’t fully appreciate the value of your soft skills before now. Identify your strongest soft skill and come up with three career experiences where you demonstrated that soft skill in action. These could very well be your cornerstone experiences helping ease your transition into business analysis. Keep them in a safe place as they will be useful to you in completing some of the later lessons. You might consider posting what you find in our Starting a BA Career LinkedIn group and receiving feedback from your peers.

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? To dig deeper into the business analyst role, purchase How to Start a Business Analyst Career. It’s available as an eBook for $24.95 and in print via Amazon for $29.95. If nothing else, just click through and read the testimonials from those who are now BAs after following the program put forward in this book—their stories will show you that this is possible. 

***Get here from a link from a friend, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter? This lesson is part 2 of an 8-part free email course on becoming a business analyst. Learn more about it and sign up here.