This is Laura Brandenburg with Bridging the
Gap. Today, I want to talk about, for the senior
business analysts and the managers and the directors out there, how do you help a new
business analyst capitalize on their transferable skills? In your role as a leader in your organization,
it’s likely that you’re approached by many people who are interested in starting
business analyst careers, but they don’t quite know where to get started. You might not know how to help them get started,
and they’re looking for your support and guidance. Helping new business analysts get started,
it’s a huge path for you, too. It’s a path into leadership, it’s a path
into expanding the credibility of the business analysis role within your company. It’s just a lot of fun. I want to start by honoring the work that
you’re doing here because I do believe we build our profession one business analyst
at a time, so, the work that you’re doing to help that new business analyst get started
is also helping build our profession. So, thank you so much. If you are a new business analyst getting
started, you still want to stay tuned into this video because it’s going to help you
know what to look for in a mentor and somebody who’s guiding you, or even pass this onto
them if they want to help you, but they’re not sure how, this would be a great resource
to pass on to them so they can use it and help you in a more structured way as well. When we’re thinking about how to help somebody
get started, the first thing we want to do is understand the depth of the skills and
experience they already have. I’ve worked with hundreds or thousands or
business analysts, or aspiring business analysts, and again and again, the pattern I see is
that they don’t appreciate the experience they already have and how it relates to the
business analysis profession. They get hung up on specific terms. I didn’t do things that were called that,
or specific templates. That’s the outer layer of what we do, and
it’s important to use the templates and the terms that are appreciated in your organization. But the core skills behind that, a lot of
times they have core analysis skills and strong communication skills, and are able to do a
lot of the work of a business analyst. They just need to provide these tweaks to
make it look like the right kind of documentation, or be able to talk about how it’s the right
kind of documentation. You want to start by helping them assess their
transferable skills. A lot of people that go through our programs
actually do this by virtue of going through some business analysis training. They start the training thinking I don’t
have the business analyst skills, and so I’m going to get some training to expand my skills,
improve my skills, and expand my experience. Through the course of going through the courses,
they realize, “Well, wait a minute; I kind of have done this before and I have done this
before.” The course helps them put that tweak on it
to give it that extra edge of formality, but it also builds upon a skill that they already
had, and an experience they already had. That’s one way to go through a transferable
skills assessment. Just take a business analysis course that
touches on a lot of the techniques and the process, and use that as a tool to figure
out what you know and what you don’t know. You can also coach somebody through this,
and that’s something I’ve done several times throughout my career as well. What you want to do is start with a list of
the key skills, and a list of the key process areas. You can create this using your job role, your
job description within your company, or by looking at job descriptions across companies. With this video, wherever you’re seeing
it, there should be a link to download a skills assessment that we offer through Bridging
the Gap. It will map to our Business Analyst Blueprint
and the 8-step business analysis process that we teach. It’s because we’ve seen these skills come
up again and again, it would be critical for new business analysts to have and be successful
in. You don’t have to create your own checklist;
you can download ours and use that as a tool as well. What do you want to do with that assessment,
though? The assessment gives you the structure, but
you as the business analyst, need to help them understand what all of these terms mean. To what depth has something that they’ve
created represent experience and valid experience in that skill? One example might be a process model. “Well, I’ve never really done that.” Then you say, “Well, let’s talk about
what it is. It’s a visual model that has activities
and boxes and decision points about if there are different paths through that process,
and a starting point and ending point. Have you ever created anything like that?” Maybe on a whiteboard. Maybe it was in Visio, maybe not. You can have that discussion and get them
thinking about, “Well, maybe I have done this at a certain point.” And start to document, then, the level of
skill that they have, and the scope of the skill, and their comfort level with that skill. You essentially want to walk through each
of those skills and what does it mean? Have they done it before? Help them see their experience in the context
of business analysis. It’s going to give a powerful view into
what they have done and what they haven’t done. Another question that I like to ask as I’m
starting an assessment like this with somebody is, just tell me about the biggest project
you’ve ever been on, or tell me about the project you think is most like a business
analysis project, or where you had a role that was closest to business analysis. We start with the project instead of starting
with the skills. As they’re talking about it, I ask, “What
was your role? Who did you communicate with? Who did you talk to? What kind of meetings were you in? What kind of meetings did you facilitate? What kind of documentation did you create?” You need questions to start to pull out from
that project, what other business analysis experience is. You’ll start to see it. You’ll be like, “Oh, you were in a meeting
with three different stakeholders.” For me, my transferable experience came from
the testing process. So, I created a new test process for my organization
that didn’t exist before. I was in meetings with business stakeholders
to review what was a test plan, but it was really a business process. Nobody told me that, but it was. I had the experience of running a meeting
with six or seven people in it that all had competing interests and wanted me to do things,
and I wanted them to do things. We were aligning on what that process should
be going forward. That was very transferable when I went to
start holding my requirements meetings and figuring out what do people want out of this
new product, and what should the requirements be, and what shouldn’t they be. Different, but similar. I was able to translate some of that experience
to be able to run those meetings more effectively right away as a business analyst. That’s the kind of thing you’re looking
for to help them understand and appreciate in themselves. One thing to be aware of is that a lot of
times it’s not going to be a direct match in terminology. It’s not that you can just ask somebody,
“Hey, have you done wireframes before?” And they’ll be like, “Yeah, I totally
did wireframes before.” This is why they’re transitioning into the
role. They might not even know what that term means. In fact, one of our first participants in
the Use Cases and Wireframes course, in the first week of the course was like, “Oh my
gosh. I was just in a job interview and they asked
me if I had ever done wireframes. And I didn’t know what that meant. And, so I said no.” The reality is he had done what he called
prototypes. Same thing. Same core skills. Maybe there were some nuances because sometimes
people use those terms differently. There’s a wide variety of visual models
that people create to model the user interface. There’s a wide variety of how that works. But the core skill of being able to create
something like that would have been valuable information for that person to share with
this employer. And it could have led to getting the job vs.
not getting the job. That’s the kind of thing you’re looking
for to help them translate the terminology and what they’ve done that might actually
be relevant. So really watch out for the differences of
terms and focus more on what that output is, and what process they were going through to
generate that output rather than what terms they used to describe it. Another term that gets used is documentation. I just created documentation. It wasn’t business analysis documentation. What documentation? What was in it? Was it the scope of the project? Was it the details of how the process worked? Was it a list of functional requirements? Could we have put that into a use case? Could you make that translation? Was there a visual model in there? What did that look like? How do we relate that to something that a
business analyst might do? Watch out for documentation, too. It’s another commonly used term that often
means something more than what the person thinks it means. I hope this helps you help your aspiring business
analysts get more confident in their skills and take even further steps in their career. The next thing you’re going to want to do
as a result of this is to give them assignments or a task that help them formalize some of
their experience, or take the next step and fill in gaps, legitimate gaps in their experience. That’s what I’m going to talk about in
the next video. In the meantime, be sure to download the assessment. I’d love to hear what you think about it. Let me know what you have done to help a new
or aspiring business analyst discover and appreciate their transferable skills. I think it would be useful for us all as a
community to share that with each other and read what each other has to say. That could give us other ideas as well. Thank you so much again for what you’re
doing to help new business analysts get started. I’m Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the
Gap. We help business analysts start their careers.