Business Analysis Homebase

Below are a series of comments and quotes from the Discord server, to help give some stories for how people landed this career:

Good question! At high-school I was into tech but also moderately social. I found a degree that was half business half IT, and they had some units on business analyst type activities and project management. I got incredibly lucky landing a generalist graduate role, where I got to work with a BA as a mentor. Seeing that work pushed me to request 2 grad rotations as a BA, and I’ve been one ever since! I got very lucky; found a degree that offered what I wanted (most people change degree in my experience), got a graduate role (400 apps for 4 roles) and got to try before I locked in (which is normally a nightmare because business analyst is notoriously difficult to break into).

I got sick of sucking in welding fumes and did a business degree but was also an okay programmer and good with people.
BA lets me talk tech to the techies and talk business to the business people. Perfect fit for me.

I got majorly lucky and was enabled to do a hybrid BA/Desktop Support role during my first ever professional job as co-op during college. All it took was 6 months for me to realize that BA is the job for me. I suck at coding, I’m no wizard at SQL / data, I’m not interested in sysadmin / networking / techytechy stuff… so all that leaves are the non-technical roles like BA, PM, etc. And it turned out that I was damn good at presenting, eliciting requirements, documenting, communicating, etc. It was simply a perfect fit from the get-go.

BA is truly a wonderful foundation for a varied, fascinating career. You can go so many different directions once you have some BA experience down. You can become a Product Owner, a tech Product Manager, a Business Architect, an IT Business Relationship Manager, a Project Manager, a Program Manager, a middle manager, an IT Director, a Data Analyst, a Data Scientist, a BI Analyst… the list goes on and on and on.

End result – I got certified as an Agile BA then IT BRM (BRMP), and have been traveling Australia as a BA for hire ever since. My feeling is that I can stay as a senior BA, or BRM quite happily till I retire. No desire to be a Project Manager (or Management at all!) and while I have post-graduate qualifications in Project Management, its not my goal.

Fell into it?

Customer Service -> Service Desk -> Service Desk “consultant” (internal) -> Project Analyst (project to operational handover) -> Systems Engineer -> Business Analyst -> ??? (whatever I’m doing this month)

Kept wanting to learn and do better things with more interesting people and once I got the bug I kept rolling with it, networking with people, learning from people, studying like a madman about anything and everything.

The actual transition was identifying problems while I was working as a systems engineer that pissed me off and making schoolboy business cases to justify my time to my TL of why i should do this stuff instead of my BAU work (I still did the BAU work anyway). I caught up with the BA manager one day and they said, “well, you’re doing requirements/design/build/test/knowledge/handover to prod… congrats you’re a BA how would you like to join my team?”. So even that was getting coffee with people in the office and talking shit and understanding how I can help and do more things and I’m here now 😄

Looking back though it made sense, it was always asking myself WHY is this happening or WHY is the customer asking me for this and trying to piece their request/issue as a part of a bigger system and then trying to understand that system as to how I was a part of it

Stefan Carton for assembly, and all the contributors from the Discord