Hi,
What certifications are considered good for a BA.
How do business Process Cert. abd CBAP differ ? Or are they the same with different naming convensions ?
How useful will the certifications be ? Is it for the current situation or employers will still give preference to those with certifications even in the future/anytime/always ?
Hi
CBAP is mainly for the business analysts. And the BA profile can be a business process analyst, business system analyst or just a business analyst. You need 7500 hrs of experience in the BA profile and references too for the certification. Definitely its gonna be useful and you do have renewal process for the certifications. its valid for 3 years. You can check out this link for more information. The international institue of business analysis.
http://www.theiiba.org/am/
I disagree with Arun. I think certification is a waste of energy and money. I have not seen any advertisement mentioning a need for a BA certification. There are lots of organisations trying to get them accepted but none has succeeded. Of course their reasons for doing this are not altruistic, they make money out of the shmucks who take the courses. Have a look at the ads on the job boards in your market to see if it is relevant where you are and act accordingly.
Just want to register my total agreement with Liddelk: passing CBAP and ISEB exams does not make a BA, very few jobs ever ask for such exams and when they do they are never mandatory, and these are self appointed organisations with no mandate to regulate the BA industry, and this lack of mandate manifests itself in disinterest from employers.
Do the BA job and analyse their drivers and like Liddelk says you are unlikely to find altruism: for example BABOK v2 is a charged for manual that was in part written by free contribitions from BAs...
But the REALLY irritating thing that organisations like these have done is over complicate and jargonise a fairly simple process of analysing user requriements.
The best advice you can get is to do what Liddlek suggests: analyse the jobs in your market, see what their requirements are and design a career plan that meets those requirements.
Guy
What your running into here is that you need to become a good/experienced BA before you take professional certification exams, like the CBAP. Studying for a BA certification is not a waste of time because it can help you organize and systematize your business experience(s) to make it more useful for the BA portion(s) of a project. Having a common technical vocabulary is part of what makes you a member of a profession. You may not be eligible to sit for the CBAP exam even if you study for it. Even as the Business Analyst profession evolves, so do the certification exam(s).
Having the knowlege, appropriate experience, a well-focused resume and the ability to interview well in a behavioral interview setting are more important to getting a job than simply having the CBAP or some other similiar certification. Being an educated and preferrably experienced BA is more important to continuing to be a sucessful BA than a certification.
So as you can see, I come down firmly on both sides of the fence :)
Tom Miller CAPM (its not a BA cert but anyone who studys for it can take/pass the exam)
brought to you by enabling practitioners & organizations to achieve their goals using:
enabling practitioners & organizations to achieve their goals using: