Business Analyst Career Advice

[DezUk]

I am looking for advice regards my career as a Business Analyst. I have been a BA for 8 years now and I still feel as though I am not 100% confident with my trade. I work with other BA's who know more than me and it has a knock on affect on my confidence. Every day at work I have other BA's writing advanced VB script, querying databases for information or collating data in spreadsheets to present the data better either as a pivot table something similar.

I feel lost in my role in the environment I am in and I feel I have left it too long to try and learn new skills at the age of 33. After this length of time as a BA I should feel comfortable applying for a Senior BA role but due to the points above I don't. I want to learn how to become a better, more skilled BA but don't know where to start.

I sort of feel into the BA career path back in 2008 when my company was bought over and ever since I have just learnt on the job or managed to wing it. I would say I am pretty creative and have a good eye for design. So I find myself being assigned the role of wireframing a mobile UI where as the technical stories are written by other BAs which is demoralising in itself. I am able to write stories but I find my knowledge lacks when it comes to database solutions or mySQL for example.

I want to try and apply for other BA roles to get myself out of this crappy job I am in but before I do that I want to learn and better myself skill wise. Thinking mainly around subjects like:

• mySQL
• Coding (HTML/CSS/JavaScript)
• Excel
• Data Migration
• SoapUI (web services)

I assume there are other BA's on this forum or software devs who know what I am on about and can maybe point me in the direction of where I should be aiming my learning and what resources are out there. I mean I know enough about Scrum/Agile/Kanban and can get by but I always think I should know more. I also want to try and better my web design skills as I used to enjoy designing a website in HTML/CSS but now that's not enough as you need JS as well. I just feel in the past few years I have let myself down with not keeping up to date with the latest standards and technologies and I'm worried I am losing my professional skills.

Hoping other BA's can help me out?

 

[DezUk]

This thread has grown arms and legs, lots of opinions and some good feedback. I should try and clear things up a little from my original post. I am down on paper as a BA working with an Agile software development team. We create a mobile solution for the public sector and my daily job involves the following:

• Creating user stories which includes the overview, requirements, acceptance criteria and any supporting documents i.e. wireframes, excel mapping docs and so forth
• Holding 3 amigo sessions with developers and testers
• Managing the sprint planning and reporting on progress and burn down of the sprint as well as holding retrospective meeting at the end of each sprint
• Getting involved with testing, recently rearranging cucumber test scripts and reviewing manual and automates tests to make sure they cover all scenarios

This is a general overview of my daily job as a BA. In other projects I have been heavily involved in using SoapUI to fire requests at an API to try and figure out how links could be made between entities stored within a database, so quite technical for a BA IMO. In the past I have worked in places where I write full blown functional specs with functional and non functional requirements working in a waterfall model. But the reason for my post is that when I am looking at other BA job specs I always see requirements for Excel and mySQL which I know I can probably learn in my own time.

I just want to keep all avenues open when it comes to career progression and have a solid coverage of all skills required for a BA. I know I mentions coding skills but this is more for my personal development as I ideally want to pursue the route of a UX designer but to do that I need a portfolio. For that I need to brush up on my coding skills to create some websites.

 

[DezUk]

Thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated