Top 10 Must-Have Business Analyst Skills For New BAs

Whether you're a recent graduate or want to transition into business analysis, you must know what skills you'll need to succeed.

The good news is that there are many different types of business analysts, so even if you don't have one of these top 10 skills right now, you will still need to develop them. However, if you want to make sure your BA career gets off on the right foot—and stays on it for years to come—these are areas where new BAs should focus their time and energy early on in their careers:

Analyzing and interpreting data

• Understand and interpret data.
• Know how to use data visualization tools like Tableau and Power BI to create visualizations that help you understand your business better (or at all). This includes:
• Creating and using dashboards that help with understanding the big picture of your company's performance in terms of revenue by product line, market share by region, etc., as well as identifying areas in which you need more information or analysis before making decisions about what should be done next;

Identifying business problems and opportunities

Identifying business problems and opportunities is a key part of the business analyst role. Before making recommendations, you must first identify the problem or opportunity to be addressed. Your ability to do so will depend on understanding what's happening in your organization and then translating those findings into actionable insights for stakeholders.

As a BA, you'll need to ask yourself two key questions: What are we doing now? And how does it compare with other companies or organizations? You'll want to pay close attention not just to what's happening but also to why it's happening--and whether there are better ways of doing things out there (or within your own company). A good example would be comparing sales processes across different regions or departments; if one region has far lower sales numbers than another despite having similar demographics and marketspace coverage, perhaps there are issues related not just to location but also process efficiency or staffing levels that could use improvement.

Making recommendations based on data and analytics

You will make recommendations based on data and analytics as a business analyst. Making recommendations is one of the most important skills for a BA because it can help your company make better decisions in the future.

To make good recommendations, you need to understand what the purpose of making recommendations is:

• To provide actionable insights that can be used by decision-makers (i.e., managers) at all levels within an organization so that they can make better decisions about how to run their business or department.
• To help improve efficiency and effectiveness within an organization by increasing employee productivity through process optimization; reducing waste by eliminating unnecessary steps in processes; identifying opportunities for automation/automation tools; improving accuracy through data quality improvement initiatives such as data cleansing and master data management (MDM).

Communicating with stakeholders about your findings

As you can see, a business analyst can communicate with stakeholders in many different ways. You need to be able to communicate with other team members and your manager to get information out of them. It would help if you communicated effectively with your stakeholders so they understand what you're doing and why it's important.

Finally, you must be able to communicate effectively at the CxO level--the highest level of management within an organization--because they will likely have questions about what you're working on or how it affects their company.

Establishing credibility with decision-makers and other team members

• Understand the needs and goals of stakeholders.
• Understand the business context.
• Understand the business environment.
• Understand the business processes.
• Understand the business culture.
• Understand the business technology, including systems and tools that your organization uses (e.g., ERP system, CRM system)

Knowing when to ask for help from other team members or subject matter experts.

Business analysts need to know when they need help and how to ask for it.

Asking questions shows that you are taking an active role in understanding the project and its requirements. If you need help understanding something or feel like your issue is too small or insignificant compared to other tasks, then reach out! Your colleagues will be more than happy to lend a hand--they want the best outcome possible too! Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.

However, there may come a time when asking for help isn't appropriate or even allowed (depending on your company's policies). For example: if two people are assigned different parts of one task, but both want to access it because "it would be easier this way," one person should say no so as not to waste anyone else's time or resources on something that could easily be handled by themselves alone.

Gaining a basic understanding of the analytics tools used in your organization.

While the business analyst role is quite broad, it's important to have a basic understanding of the analytics tools used in your organization. This can be as simple as knowing how to use and find data in them, but it could also involve knowing when it makes sense for you as an individual BA to make decisions on your own or with others based on what you find.

Identify the use cases or scenarios that best apply to each scenario you're trying to solve.

Identify the use cases or scenarios that best apply to each scenario you're trying to solve.

A use case is a way of describing what a system needs to do. It helps you understand the problem you are trying to solve and helps with scope management by helping you identify what's in and out of scope for your project.

Using a variety of cognitive abilities when working through problems.

When you're working on a problem, you'll need to use a variety of cognitive abilities. These include logical, creative, and critical thinking skills; emotional intelligence; interpersonal skills; and more.

The top 10 skills new business analysts must have

• Analyzing and interpreting data.
• Identifying business problems and opportunities.
• Making recommendations based on data and analytics.
• Communicate with stakeholders about your findings, including identifying gaps in their understanding or areas that need further clarification, so you can work together effectively toward a shared goal of improving the business process or product being analyzed. You'll also want to establish credibility with decision-makers and other team members who may need to become more familiar with your analysis tools (for example, Excel). That means being able to explain how these tools help you achieve results that are accurate enough for what they need from an analyst like yourself but also provide more insight than raw numbers would allow--and show that this approach will give them better information than if they had tried another method themselves instead!

Finally: knowing when asking someone else on your team who knows more about something than yourself is necessary because either A) there isn't enough time left before the deadline, so getting help ASAP is best practice; B) there's no way around needing outside input because nobody else understands why something happened/happened differently than expected C yet) asking questions now will save hours later down the road once everyone starts using these new processes regularly again after implementation."

Conclusion

We hope we can give you a better understanding of what it takes to be a successful business analyst. While this list is by no means exhaustive, it should help you get started on your journey toward becoming a BA. Most importantly, you keep learning new things and developing yourself. That way, when opportunities arise in your organization or industry, they'll be ready for them!