Hi All
I have a MBA in marketing from India, Also had a two year corporate sales experience in a leading airline company in India, have been in US for the Last three years now and havent worked since.
I would like to fresh start my career as a Business Analyst , I am aware that it is pretty tough to get that first interview call cuss everyone in the field has 5 -6 years of experience but i guess everyone once had to start somewhere. I came across this certificate program that Northwestern offers and is a endorsed education provider of IIBA. The Courses included for the Certification are: -- Changing role of the BA -- Initiating Projects and Elicitation of Requirements -- Developing Process-Centric Business Requirements through Process Models and use cases -- Principals of Business Process Management
Is this going to be of any help to me ? will this be the stepping stone to get into BA, something that i am desperately looking for? Any input in this regard will be greatly appreciated!!
Thanks in advance!
PS:I dont have any prior IT knowledge
Hi Rima,
The certification sounds good, but is for those with prior BA experience. For students like you :
1. You need to understand the concepts and details around IT industry and BA field
2. Need to be prepared to crack the interviews.Be able to answer all the questions of the interviews and speak in the language which a BA does.
The above certification is not going to prepare you with all the concepts, it will cover only few of them
My advice would be to first prepare yourself with all the skills and techniques and then go for IIBA certification later. I advice only certification from IIBA personally as I feel that this will be the one that will set BA standards in the industry.
contact me at : [email protected]
if you have more questions. I have trained number of freshers to get jumpstart in this profession.
Thanks
There are many ways to prepare for such an exam. Since you already have your MBA, I agree that this will help to get you into the BA field. I suggest that you begin working on the cert, as time permits, and set a goal to: 1. get as much BA experience as possible, and to 'find' the BA experience you already gained, and 2. set a goal to get certified as soon as time permits. Again, since you already have your MBA, I do nto think you need highly formalized training around the BA topic. This can be expeisive and a waste of time for pro's like you with a strong university education. What you need is mastery of the basics, a credential, and then entre into positions that will give you more experience and from which you can build your career.
Online education might help, and we provide BA cert info and IIBA-aligned online 24x7 training at Project Management Training Online.
John Reiling PMcrunch.com
I recommend "Seven Steps to Mastering Business Analysis" by Barbra Carkenord to get yourself oriented. The other 2 responders gave you completely conflicting advice. I can only say that one idea for gaining real BA experience is volunteering at a non-profit.
As for IT experience, assuming you have a full command of the Microsoft Office Suite the question is how much more IT exposure do you want? Practicing developing databases on MS Acess certainly can't hurt. Or learning a little "Visual Basic for Applications" which might be very handy in Excel at least.
If you want to explore IT development further, Microsoft is making available its Visual Studio product in an "Express" form for free and providing what appears to be a pretty complete set of tutorials to get you to the point where your a beginner. They have several different versions. I like the Web Express version. It will help to have a high-speed internet connection.
Tom
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