hey bridging the gap arose this is Lora Brandenburg and the creator of bridging the gap and at bridging the gap we have mid-career professionals get started in business analysis careers we're a virtual training provider and we're endorsed both by I IBA and PMI so all of our courses can help you towards their certification goals I wanted to pop in today with a quick video about three reasons that people become business analysts so if you've been watching what we've been sharing recently you've seen we've shared some snapshots a blog post I wrote a long time back that was really well received within the VA community about forty two reasons to become a business analyst so I don't have time today to go through all 42 I'll share a link to the blog post if you'd like to kind of get into more detail but I did want to pick out three that just jumped out at me when I reviewed that blog post today of some of my favorite reasons to be a business analyst so one is about the mix of independent work and extroverted or kind of people centered work and really a good BA and somebody who has a natural tendency to like business analysis it's going to want to do a fair amount of independent work and usually as much as two thirds of your work day might be sitting at a desk so if you're thinking of a typical eight-hour day that could be five to six hours at your desk working on requirement specification solving problems working through the analysis process and the other part of that is going to be working directly with people small group settings meetings and stakeholder engagement maybe just you know your project manager drop the drops by him if you want an update on the project developer drops by they have a question about the requirements so that can be somewhat scheduled and some impromptu depending on your situation and I've seen that variation it's not always 2/3 and 1/3 depending on the role you could be in meetings and one one conversations as much as half your day so it does really depend on the rule but usually a mix both so you have to like being with people but you also have to like that independent work and that's not for everyone not everybody likes to be working in their own space quietly and you know in working on their own for a long period of time or a long stretch of time so that's one thing to think about if you're pursuing a business analyst exterior does that sound like something that you would enjoy a pattern of work that you would enjoy so the segue and I wanted to talk about and feel free and joining to say hello or leave a comment I'd love to hear who's listening in and and if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer those as well so the second one I wanted to talk about is really working with people at all levels of the organization so a typical business analyst does it all right head of lip they're a typical business analyst does it work with just subject matter experts or just developers or just managers or just you know VPS they typically work with all of those levels right so you're talking about people who are in heads down in the work day-to-day people who manage that work people who maybe oversee that work at a very high level project managers developers testers you're working with all different kinds of people and often helping them communicate with each other will have to enjoy that variety of people it's not like you get to pick your favorite kind of person that you get to work with and you're always working with them you're gonna be working with a very wide variety of people who have different interests different ways of communicating different preferences for how they communicate and that really does influence the job because of the bit because the BA often we're right in the center of all of that and so it's important to to be able to work with different kinds of people and a big part of being successful in that role so does that sound interesting another reason that you might be PA that should be like yeah I love that I love that idea of working with different people and not always working with the same kind of person so know burfi is also one of my favorite and that I'm gonna just share a little bit of the backstory it was mentoring a woman it probably was five six years ago now and we were working on her resume and she told me that all of her stakeholders had this nickname for her and then nickname was Colombo and I was like Colombo I always kind of thought a Colombo you know the detective from the the TV series like he never quite had it all together right or he kind of always seemed a little frumpy and you know whatever it was like that's a really weird nickname like how did that come up and her answer there was that I always have one more question right so as a BA that's something to be thinking about - do you always have one more question do you love to ask questions do you seriously are you curious about the answer to those questions are you willing to be more of the questioner and less of the talker which when you think about Colombo and that idea like that he's kind of frumpy and he seems like he doesn't have it all together but at the end of the day he always found the person who did the crime right he did kind of have it together he just didn't come off that way and a lot of times as a BA that is perfectly a perfect analogy for how we come off to like something not quite adding up here right like you might find yourself saying yeah something's not quite up here here you saying this and you saying that and then people look at you like what you're crazy but then they start talking about it and they realize that oh right I think really wasn't adding up there so are you comfortable asking questions always you know being the why why why having one more question now you also comfortable kind of in some ways in some respects filling that role that Columbo fills on the TV show so those are the three reasons that I wanted to highlight today again that makes an independent work and people centered work working with people at all levels of the organization and feeling a bit and acting a bit like Columbo and always having one more question so feel free to drop in a comment if there's an issue reason you want to share what do you love about BBA we'll drop in a comment with the link to 40 reasons post Oh looks like my awesome social media assistant Addie has done that for me so the link gets there feel free to check that out let me know one of the reasons jump out to you and if there's any questions you have about getting started in your business analysis career I'd be happy to support you with those so again my name is Laura Brandenburg I'm the creator of bridging the gap and we are a virtual training organization helping mid-career professionals start business and houses careers thanks for watching talk soon