How to Become a Business Analyst within Your Budget

We often receive requests from people seeking advice on how to become a business analyst. As you will see, breaking into business analysis — like any other profession — is a non-trivial undertaking.

Learning How to Learn Better

For starters, I suggest viewing our video FAST TRACK to Building Business Analysis Skills, paying particular attention to how we as human beings learn. After that, this is our recommended course of events for those of you who see a promising future as a Business Analyst.

A FREE Introduction to the Business Analysts’ Universe

Once you have digested the learning concepts, I recommend viewing all of the FREE KnowledgeKnuggets™ available on our website for future business analysts. Each KnowledgeKnugget™ takes between 5 – 10 minutes to complete. I recommend viewing them in the following order:

This should give you a great idea of what the field of business analysis is all about, what business analysts do, and — best of all — all of this knowledge is free!

Interactive, Self-paced Training at a Reasonable Cost

To support individual learning styles, we offer many techniques in the form of interactive, animated, and narrated self-paced eCourses. To enhance the learning process, our eCourses include several exercises in each section and provide expert feedback for each exercise.

One of the major responsibilities of the Business Analyst role is expressing business, stakeholder, solution, and transition requirements in a language that both the business community and solution providers (e.g., developers, configuration analysts, assemblers, etc.) will interpret the way the author intended. To get you started on the right foot, we highly recommend our self-paced courses. Tens of thousands around the globe have enjoyed and implemented the presented ideas in various formats. Our latest and favorite versions are (in the strongly recommended sequence):

For those who prefer reading, we also publish the content of all of our eCourses in books which you can preview and order via Amazon.com. For a complete listing of our currently available publications, see at Business Analysis Books and eBooks.

Investing in Your Future as a Business Analyst

Many adults prefer and learn best when interacting with an instructor. The interaction can be in person or virtual. The instructor brings the added dimension of personal experience and war stories and can adjust the delivery to the needs of the audience. When you are ready to expand your skills with our instructor-led classes, consider taking a series of public, online classes. Each class is 1 – 3 days long and includes extensive exercises with instructor debriefs.

I hope these recommendations help you achieve your business analysis goals and I would appreciate an update from you periodically on your progress as you develop your business analysis skills.

Tom Hathaway