Look at my other website http://www.resourcesforbusinessanalysts.com for information on getting into the field.

Also, Laura Brandenburg has a great blog for Business Analysts at http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/

Those are two good places to start.

Good luck!

What Alex Mandossian has been using is a Facebook fan page and Tweetchat. With those tools, the people attending the teleseminar can interact online while attending the teleseminar. I participated in one such session, and it worked great.

Some teleseminar software provides online chats during the teleseminar as well. I saw that yesterday on BlogTalk Radio. That worked out well too.

I am trying different combinations in the teleseminars I lead. I think the online chat is very interesting because it can be limited to the people attending and not open to the general public. If people post on Facebook or Twitter, then anyone can see it.

Geri

I have been working as IT Helpdesk for 2 years and I want to shift to Business Analysis and focus on this field. I really am overwhelmed and don’t know where to start to get on with this career.

Any thoughts? I would really appreciate your reply. Thank you.

One thing you can consider is what you want your career to be. If you look at my page http://www.resourcesforbusinessanalysts.com the big graphic in the box marked Develop shows many positions that BA’s have moved into over time. Are those careers that interest you? Then maybe becoming a Senior Solutions Analyst is a good move. If Team Lead is something that leads to management positions, then if you want to be a manager, that job is the better one.

I think either job can be quite good. It really depends on what you want to do in 3 years, 5 years, or 10 years from now, and which job will lead you to that goal.

Best -

Geri

Thanks for the great, thoughtful comments!

I agree about BA’s learning their craft from experts and other reputable sources. I think there is a lot of very good and even excellent training easily available. The hard part for most people is figuring who the experts and reputable sources are!

What I see is that companies are not paying for much training anymore. They are throwing people into the job and not providing training. Recent US surveys (I do not have them handy but they can be found online) indicate that companies are paying for about 40 hours (5 days) of training a year. This includes their required safety and security training, diversity training, possibly regulatory training, and leaves very little time for training in the professional field.

I do not see many people stepping up and paying for the training themselves, possibly because they want their companies to pay for it. And so they are browsing the internet looking at whatever material they can find that is free, and do not know what is good, what is bad.

I appealed to “common sense”. What other measures can people use to evaluate the information that are finding?

Anyone is welcome to contribute to the conversation.

Geri

Marketing has taught us to believe too many lies and so we second guess things that are self evident. Witness racism, sexism, fear of refugees and so on. Even the need to use deodorant…

Bureaucracy is a machine that whittles away at people’s free will in order to optimize an extant system. People lose faith in their own decision making ability in this context. Corporations are almost always bureaucracies and so many of us work there.

So maybe analysts should instead focus their energies on learning their craft from experts in a master-apprentice fashion and augment that with learning from reputable sources such as universities and reputable experts.

What do you think?

It is a good article. I need your advice. I have 8 years of experience in Software Testing. Currently I am working as a Senior Quality Assurance Analyst. I am looking for a change. I got a Job in big company as Team Lead.To retain me, my company offered me Senior Solutions Analyst (Senior Business Analyst) position. I am very new to this position but I have good grip on our Product. So, they are not allowing me to leave. I am in big confusion. Which Job I should opt? Which is best job. Which Job will have career growth. Again I am starting my carrer as BA right? It is completely different from my profile. Which one is better? Kindly advice me.

I am assuming from your post that Pre-Sales is an engineering position, because you seemed to expect a position as a Project Engineer. In other words, you provide the Engineering expertise on the sales team. If that is the case, then you have good experience with both technology and people skills. That should be really good background for jobs where that combination of skills is helpful – such as Business Analyst, Systems Analyst, Product Marketing, post sales support (consulting, technical training, custom installations of software), Project Management, Quality Assurance, and Technical support (which is VERY different from customer support).

The IIBA has a certification program for Business Analysts. Many BA’s also certify as Project Managers either through Prince2 in Europe or Project Management Institute in the USA.

Some companies want their BA’s to specialize in an industry or domain. So for example you could certify in banking or insurance.

I would also suggest you talk to people in your company who are doing the work you want to do. Find out how they got into those positions, what background and skills are required. They can provide you more specific information about the possibilities.

Geri

Your email is coming up as unsubscribed from the list. I’ll forward the details to the email you have given here.

I cannot reactivate your email (it’s a feature of the list to prevent me from spamming people ), but you can resubscribe at http://www.wyyzzk.com/freeclasssales.html

Thanks for letting me know!

Geri