Business analytics and business analysis may sound similar but they are two distinct jobs. This article and the video explain the distinction between these two careers.
The Educational Provider edX Makes A Mistake
We last week looked at the site of edX which is a huge institution that offers courses. We were able to see that edX published the page titled business analysis however when we looked through the courses page of the website, we saw that there were no business analysis courses on the site.
All of the courses they identified could be classified as business analytics as well as data analysis classes. The way they presented it and the way they had mingled the terms analysis will lead most people to believing these courses are analytical related courses.
Employers Can Also Make Such Mistakes
The job advertisement we discuss in this video commits the same error like the edX website. However, this is the confusion that comes via an employer rather than a education service provider.
This company has essentially mis-named their role in business analytics as a role for a business analyst.
A Mistitled Business Analysis Role
The employer has put the job title in the same manner that you’d typically encounter for business analyst positions but, when we examine the required skills it becomes apparent immediately that the job they’re promoting isn’t one for business analysts.
We can go through this job’s description and find out what qualifications they’re seeking. After you’ve read the details, it’ll become obvious for you to know that it isn’t an analyst position for business.
The Actual Jobs Requirements
They’re claiming they’d like more than three many years experience working in the field of business analytics or intelligence. We can immediately discern that this isn’t an analyst position for business. They’re seeking experience working with tools for business intelligence like Tableau which is a highly-popular tool for reporting on BI/data warehousesing.
Tableau is a suite of programs which collects data from number of sources within an organization, and allows the business intelligence team in the organization create reports using the accumulated data.
Business Intelligence Teams
The teams that work on business intelligence in many companies are usually part of the business responsible for generating reports. As business analysts that we are do not often participate in those kinds of activities unless you’re a business analyst who is specialized on business intelligence?
This Role Requires Programming
What the employer is looking for is someone with an extensive background in programming that will assist them in jobs related to data science. Another indicator is that they are looking for people who are familiar with what is known as “scripting languages”.
Certain technical roles in business analysts might require SQL however, for the business analyst role do not require you to create scripts with R as well as Python. The types of jobs that require these scripting languages typically are jobs in business analytics that are often not categorized as business analyst jobs.
How To Tell The Difference
A Venn diagram like this one can aid in understanding the distinction between these two distinct roles, so that you don’t need to depend on external educational providers to show you the distinction between the two different roles.
Even if the employer has mislabeled their job title or job title, you should be able to utilize this diagram to inform yourself if it’s a business analysis position or a different.
Typical Business Analyst Job Requirements
What you’ll typically notice in the distinction between the two positions is that the majority of business analyst positions are going require you to complete things such as functional specifications, business requirements as well as use cases in wire frames.
A majority of them will request you to complete process design too. The tools they’ll want you to use are such as Visio, Word, SharePoint, JIRA.
These are the kinds of competencies that business analysts utilize in the context of an enterprise.
Typical Business Analytics Job Requirements
If you take a look at the business analytics roles it will show many more abilities similar to the orange section of Venn diagram.
If you find these types of job requirements, you must automatically exclude that as a role in business analytics regardless of the title. These aren’t the kind of expertise we need as business analysts to be a successful professional.
These are the kinds of skills that most previous mathematicians and programmers learn for data science related tasks.
If you take a look at the sample job and see Data Science, Data warehousesing business intelligence, etc It should be a evident that this isn’t a typical business analyst position.
If they are asking you to have the qualifications for math, like statistics or probability that is an indication that the company isn’t seeking a business analysis job, but is instead in search of a data scientist or business intelligence job.
If you are seeing things such as Python and Pearl as scripting languages. If you recognize these that you could immediately write the job application off as more of a business intelligence an enterprise or data analytics job rather than a business analysis job.
I hope this provides you with some clarity regarding your personal development since if you continue to be confused about these two distinct roles it’s possible that you’ll spend a portion hours trying to master Python or Perl or any other stuff that they’re requesting, but not aware that you’re likely to actually using these skills in your company analysis job.
