Business Analysis Homebase

Graduate roles are a fantastic entry path to most industries and professions, and Business Analyst is no different. It’s a great opportunity to network, try unique projects and of course get to try your hand at one or more roles early into your career which is great experience.

⚠ Landing one is hard. Do not underestimate the challenge

It’s HYPER competitive, as there tends to be a fairly broad pool of applicants trying to land their first job right out of university. It’s often 100+ applicants per one graduate role on offer. Four roles, 400 applications. This also means you’ll likely be trying a similar “shotgun-style” approach of sending many out broadly to see what lands.

When applying for graduate programs, they need 5x the research compared to your average job application; you’re expected to know the company, what they offer, and their general market (if they have a market). If you walk in and say, “oh, you’re a private IT company,” but didn’t do the research to realise you applied for a “non-for-profit, government-owned enterprise only servicing other government departments” you’ll be walking out shortly after.

In a quote from the Discord:

“It’s mental how switched on other people were at these [assessment] centres, it’s like they were researching and practising everything about that company almost to the extent they knew what the CEO has for breakfast!”

A member of the Discord

Hypothetically, let’s say your resume and cover letter get you through to the top 30% of the hundreds of applicants. From there, you’ll generally have “graduate program assessment centres”. These generally involve a series of tests and interviews to gauge your intellect and attitude. A range of verbal, numerical, and psychometric testing. These may take place individually or include group exercises. One example of a half-day graduate assessment centre included a 1 vs 3-panel interview, a group interview involving problem-solving and making a recommendation on how to solve an organisational issue, and finally, an essay on how to approach an issue. During all these phases, additional company staff will observe you from the side of the room, taking notes. With luck, you’ll have time to ask these organisation representatives questions between these assessments. Those people you ask questions to are likely on the panel or previous graduates, so knowing the right questions and prompting other shy members gets you higher on the scale.

Some advice

• Apply at the start of your final year, as applications close by February for the major companies. The university never tells you this, and it’s often too late by the time you’re thinking of it halfway into your final year.
• Apply for as many as possible, to a decent quality, since they rarely get back to you.
• Do your research. Know the competitors, who they market to, and the types of things they offer.
• Just spouting buzzwords you can’t define or elaborate on will get you noticed quickly. Not in a good way.
• Don’t come with pre-prepared answers; the intention is to throw you off, and you will need to elaborate on any point.
• Don’t lie about any work you’ve done on your resume. “Crypto-analysis” sounds interesting, but when prompted to elaborate (you will be) and you are forced to tell the interviewer that you asked developers for their SSL certs to be refreshed, they’ll see you embellished just a little too much.
• Don’t be the only one in the spotlight; elaborate on others’ comments, commend them for their ideas, and offer time for the quiet people to speak. Being a BA is a very soft-skills career, so demonstrating empathy, understanding, and the ability to bring out the best in others is the valuable.
• Don’t be an obvious ass-kisser; intelligent questions will show your research and enthusiasm. These kinds of smart questions where they talk for a bit will help you tailor your answers as you learn more about the organisation. You can apply this knowledge to future interviews.
  • Project or achievement questions like “Hey, I heard you did XYZ, could you tell us a bit about it? What do you use? What was the structure of the team?”
  • Domain-specific questions like “How do you handle all the risk and compliance around XYZ? I imagine it’s pretty brutal given the magnitude of finances you manage”.

Considerations

It’s definitely a sacrifice in pay (relative to other roles), but getting to try 3 or more roles/jobs and hopefully pick where you want to continue your career, the networks you make, the extra mentoring/attention the organisation gives you, the license to ask dumb questions because you’re “the graduate,” it’s magnificent. In a perfect world, everyone could do one. But in the grand scheme, insider knowledge is gone once you leave that organisation. The company will avoid promotions and legitimate pay rises if they can, because you’ll likely be working hard to prove your value. Rather, they use that lack of experience as an excuse to keep you low and underpaid for a long period of time. You’ll be doing the work of people 2-4 pay brackets above, people literally earning double, because of eager youth willing to work and learn for scraps as part of their first role. You gain experience, they get cheap labour. On that final point, a graduate program longer than 12 months will have diminishing returns in terms of pay and experience, being far more brazen in their attempt to keep cheap labour for a long time.

The best approach tends to be to work hard, build a reputation and network, hopefully, be offered an ongoing full-time role, and then move on after two years to a job paying double. It’s scary to make that jump, but you’ll learn more from it and prove that you have the skills to earn market rates rather than graduate rates.

Stefan Carton, Madina, & Mr Dapper

Updated: 18/08/2022