Guide for a fresh graduate to get a Business Analyst job

How to become a Business Analyst without Experience

Once having written the final exams of the lifetime, students very eagerly look forward to joining the workforce and earning that first paycheck. It’s not just the money but the sense of respect that we gain in the eyes of the society that makes us yearn to get that job and earn that money.

If you have planned your career to begin with Business Analysis, then congratulations!!! Your career option is apt, highly relevant in the current times and future, very rewarding and of course needs some fresh mindsets to explore it further and that’s where you can pitch in.

But how often have you thought about how to make it happen? How to get that job as a Business analyst? Which companies to aim for? How to prepare for it? Are there any professional mistakes that are keeping you away from that job? What are the things that give you an edge over others in the search for a BA role?

Why become a Business Analyst

Given the current rate of uncertainty all over; more and more companies are delving into Digitization, Automation, Transcoding etc. These imply that a lot of jobs would become redundant or at least less dependent on human intervention in the future. Machines will take over leaving lesser number of jobs from the current set for us. This gives us a bigger reason to find some profession which has least effect in the future. How about Business Analysis? The very nature of this job involves lots of tasks which cannot be ‘learnt’ by systems so easily. Doesn’t that make it even more alluring to try for? With no further ado, let’s get into the heart of the matter.

While the decision to get into Business Analysis is worth appreciating, it needs to be backed up with adequate preparation. With more and more people getting attracted to this option, you need to do something extra to prove your mettle as a BA.

In this article, we will focus on the IT Business Analysis. Being a fresh graduate, you can aim for the role of an Associate Business Analyst or a Junior Business Analyst in an IT company. Your educational qualification as a graduate in fields like Information Technology or Computer Science would help but is not a mandatory requirement to enter IT Business Analysis. If you have a master’s degree in Business Administration, Marketing, Information Systems; that would make it easier. But that isn’t mandatory either.

Steps to Become a Business Analyst

Now, let’s get into the steps to be taken:

Networking

This is something you can start doing even before you complete your studies. Stay in touch with people who belong to this field. It could be your seniors working in this field; the teaching staff who are in touch with the IT industry, your fellow batch mates who are also keen to get into IT Business analysis, your acquaintances who spent a great deal of their lives as IT BAs etc. Interacting with them will open many avenues. The knowledge they share, the contacts they provide, the discussion in which they tell you about what’s the latest buzz in the industry – all these make your job search more efficient.

Interaction channels like LinkedIn, Facebook can be effectively used to connect with such individuals whose experience will go a long way in helping you with your job. You need to know how to find the right people using these platforms and how to connect with them without sounding too desperate for a job or too opportunistic (well, if you talk only with the sole purpose of finding a job, it wont take long for any person to realise and start ignoring you). You need to interact with an intention to know more. Show genuine interest in the field. Follow their posts. Share your inputs on their work and seek their feedback on your work (may be you have worked on a project based on IT, you may be planning to publish an article on BA, you perhaps are already interning at an IT firm and you can ask their suggestions on doing a better job). While a job search is your main goal, that can’t be achieved in isolation without focusing on these minor milestones.

Prep up your resume

Being a fresh graduate, your resume might not have much to brag about your professional experience. Unless you have interned in a firm and the work you did there is quite relevant to IT business Analysis; it doesn’t add value of having such points mentioned in your resume. Then how do you bring in that IT BA flavor in your resume?

You need to realize that you needn’t do so by focusing on only the work experience part. Your resume should showcase your keen interest in this role. And that can be done in few other ways too.

• Try learning about IT BA online. There is a plethora of options available. Online Business Analysis training courses offer you a great deal of knowledge at a very reasonable price.
• Get some real-time understanding on BA work by offering to assist some full-time BAs in their work (your networking can help you in getting in touch with such BAs). When you offer to help, you may be allowed to take up some documentation work or the task of consolidating all the queries that the tech team has in the requirements. These tasks too have a lot to teach you.
• Then, there are some books like BABOK which are referred world-wide, so get a copy of it and follow the concepts mentioned.

Don’t forget to mention these points on your resume. These serve as brownie points and help in differentiating your resume from others.

Is the resume your only weapon for your job search?

Most of the companies in the current times request only resume from the candidates to proceed with the job selection process. But the resume may not allow you to mention some additional points as to how this job is more relevant to you over others.

• Perhaps, you stay within a km distance from the company which makes your commute to office easier and thus lets you work better.
• May be an acquaintance of yours works in the same company and he can share in some good feedback about your nature of work.
• Or else, you might have been associated with this company in some way in the past.
• Or you may be skilled in a specific domain or field which this company is expanding into and you can showcase how your skillset in that field can turn out to be beneficial for the company if they hire you over others.
• Maybe you are using one of their products and you have something special to mention about it along with how you have found ways to make it more efficient.

One thing to note in all these points is that these are specific to the company that you are applying for. So, you cannot have a one-suit-fits-all approach. Should you then keep changing your resume constantly and customize it for every company that you apply for? That’s quite a cumbersome process.

Your Cover Letter comes to your rescue here. Even if not asked for, prepare a Cover Letter and send it along with your resume especially when the company that you are applying for is prominent one and you would love to see yourself working over there.

A Cover Letter is a place where you can mention a lot of points which do not fit in a normal resume but help in getting your profile highlighted and make it unique from the rest. Make use of this option. It gives you an edge when the recruitment team notices that you have taken some extra efforts to send a Cover Letter too along with the resume. If your Cover Letter does contain the relevant points which do make you a better fit for the company, that would increase your selection chances considerably.

So, the next time when you are applying for a big company and you do have something beyond your resume points to highlight, don’t forget to prepare a Cover Letter and send it across.

Know a lot on IT Business Analysis

As you come with no work-experience, there isn’t much for the interviewer to ask about your previous projects, how was your work over there, which methodology was used etc. So, they rely on finding out how much do you know about the job that you are trying to get into. So, learn about the possible concepts. This can be done by:

• Following online forums and websites related to Business Analysis (like mindmapped.com)
• Watching YouTube videos related to this field. There are lots of channels on YouTube which share lots of videos on this topic. It serves a good place to start with learning about the basics from.
• Joining BA groups on social media channels and interacting with the BA network out there. There are lot of WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, Facebook BA groups and LinkedIn forums which are dedicated to the field of IT Business Analysis. Join those and keep following the content shared.

The focus should be trying to know and understand as much about Business Analysis as possible. Even the interview questions for a fresher would hardly focus on the domain and are more concerned about the BA skills. So, this is not the time for you to narrow down to domain skills right away. Keep your options open.

How to go through the BA Job Search process

Go through some job descriptions of Associate Business Analyst and Junior Business Analyst. Watch out for the key words which keep appearing in multiple job descriptions (focus on job descriptions of only IT Business Analyst roles. A lot of jobs go with the title of ‘Business Analysis’ but are quite different in terms of the work that’s expected). Track all the key words (like Stakeholder Management, Requirements gathering, FRD, BRD, documentation, workshops…). How many such key words are you already aware of? Do you find some jargons completely unrelatable? Then its time to get back to your network and seek their help.

Check out all the options that you have to gain an understanding on these key aspects of IT Business Analysis work.

Apart from your resume, your LinkedIn profile should also reflect your interest in this field. As part of networking, you might have already added a lot of professionals from this field in your connections. Follow their posts wherein they share snippets related to Business Analysis.

Use the job search options available on LinkedIn and other job portals to find the number of opportunities available based on your criteria like location (mostly, you would be trying to find a job within a specific city), experience required (jobs which mention 0-2 years of experience needed). Unless you stay in some remote corner of the world, chances are that you would find many BA requirements. While trying to sift through those, you might find quite a few being relevant to your profile. Go through the specific job descriptions and apply for those jobs. Here you need to note that quality matters more than quantity.

Final Thoughts on how to get a BA Job without Experience

Applying to 100’s of companies will only lead to disappointment as it shows that you have blindly applied wherever you have seen the term, ‘BA required’ without getting into the details. That’s not going to be of any help other than increasing the count of companies that you have applied for. Rather, focus on the companies whose requirements matches your skillset and profile. Not only will that help you in being attentive at the entire process, you can also spend more time fine-tuning your Cover Letter, resume to make it customized for the offer at hand. If at all, the job description mentions a thing or two about some mandatory or preferable skills needed, you can spend time learning at least the basics of those instead of  clicking on ‘Apply’ and ‘submit’ multiple times for all job opportunities that you have come across.

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