Standing as a bridge between innovation and execution, business analysts know the secret to running a business that is always ahead of its competitors. But do they know the secret to crafting an impressive resume?
If not, don’t fret! That’s why we’re here; to help you identify essential business analyst skills to include in your CV and present them in a way that will leave potential employers convinced you are exactly what they are looking for.
Key Takeaways
Business analyst skills and responsibilities encompass various abilities that allow professionals to identify, collect, analyze, communicate, and interpret key data to support strategic decisions and the overall business strategy.
Business analyst skills are essential for making informed decisions, mitigating risks, ensuring competitive advantage, optimizing business processes, planning and forecasting, and understanding end users.
You can include business analyst skills in the summary, skills section, and cover letter. It is also important to highlight relevant education.
Essential business analyst skills include statistics and probability programming skills, data analysis, data visualization, business intelligence tools, communication, negotiation, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making.
To improve your business analyst skills, make sure you keep up with the latest trends in the industry and stay open to continuous learning.
What Are Business Analyst Skills?
Business analysts need a variety of unique skills to recognize, gather, analyze, communicate, and interpret important data so they can use it to find solutions for business improvement. These skills are indispensable as they allow companies to recognize their shortcomings and advantages and identify their potential growth areas.
A business analyst is crucial in helping companies bridge the gap between their needs and technological solutions, ensuring that the business is aligned with best practices and the company's strategic goals.
Therefore, having business analyst skills is a huge advantage, even if you are not applying for the role of a business analyst, as these skills are useful in every line of business. Including them in your resume is necessary because it signals to potential employers that you have a deep understanding of the company.
Why Are Business Analyst Skills Important?
Nowadays, we have an incredible variety of tools that allow us to gather data that was inaccessible in the past. But without business analyst skills, this data doesn’t mean much. These skills are, therefore, essential for:
Importance of Business Analyst Skills
Making informed decisions. Thanks to the insights provided by business analysis, managers can make practical decisions more easily.
Ensuring competitive advantage. Business analysis identifies trends in the industry, allowing companies to adapt to the fast-paced business environment, recognize new market opportunities, or introduce innovations.
Optimizing resources. Analytic-driven insights enable the best possible resource allocation in accordance with the company's needs.
Managing risk. Identifying a company’s strengths and weaknesses and predicting trends based on data allow for a proactive approach to mitigating risks.
Planning and forecasting. An experienced business analyst is a huge asset in planning and forecasting a company’s production, resource allocation, inventory management, and business strategy.
Understanding consumers. Business analysts can draw highly precise, data-driven conclusions about consumers’ needs, behaviors, and preferences.
How to Add Business Analyst Skills to Your Resume
The goal of your resume is to provide compelling and concise evidence of your suitability for the specific job. Therefore, it is essential that you tailor it to match the exact requirements of the position in question.
Here are a few ideas on how to highlight business analyst skills in your resume:
Tips to Enhance Business Analyst Skills Section
Use tailored keywords from the desired job description to ensure your resume passes through automated applicant tracking systems. By using keywords throughout the resume, you also signal to potential employers that your experience matches the job requirements.
Include your best business analyst skills in the objective/summary and describe what you bring to the company as a business analyst.
Group your skills into multiple skill sections organized by their relevance to the job you are applying for. Instead of just listing skills, provide examples and context to showcase your expertise.
Use your cover letter to emphasize how your business analyst skills developed through different experiences and what makes you a great fit for the role.
Don’t hesitate to quantify the results of your work as a business analyst and express them in percentages and numbers, as business analysts do.
Highlight relevant education and certifications in the designated section.
10 Business Analyst Skills to Include in Your Resume
Instead of compiling generic lists of typical business analyst skills, concentrate on the ones you have actually honed and briefly describe how you use them.
Here’s a list of essential business analyst skills with a short description of what they entail so that you can choose the suitable ones to highlight in your resume:
#1. Statistics and Probability
Statistics is the basic tool for business analysts that allows them to bring clarity to complex data from various resources. From collecting and connecting data to breaking it down into meaningful insights and translating it into probability predictions, statistics and probability are essential for business analysis.
Good Example
It’s best to highlight these skills by putting them in a specific context. Here’s an example of how you can do that:
Statistics and probability: I processed and manipulated data drawn from diverse resources using xx computer software to produce final statistics reports, outlining key project insights and interpreting the results to provide recommendations for future projects.
#2. Programming Skills
Programming skills are considered business analyst technical skills. They are a huge plus in a business analyst's resume, as they are very helpful in data analysis, data visualization and reporting, and automation of processes. If you have them, make sure to provide information on the type of programming knowledge and skills that you have. You can do that in this way:
Programming skills:
Programming languages: Python
Data Visualization: Tableau
Automation: Excel VBA
Good Example
I found Python very helpful in extracting and analyzing extensive datasets, allowing me to make actionable insights. Using Tableau, I created data analysis workflows and saved up to 25% of processing time. Thanks to Excel VBA, I successfully automated data manipulation, which resulted in a 30% efficiency increase.
#3. Data Analysis
Data analysis refers to the ability to collect, clean, organize, process, analyze, and interpret data and translate it into actionable, practical insights. The aim of data analysis is to support making informed strategic decisions, identify trends and opportunities, and set goals and performance standards.
Your resume should include this skill, followed by a real-life example of how you used data analysis skills and what the outcomes were. This is how to include it:
Good Example
Data analysis: I used advanced data analysis skills to process extensive data sets to optimize resource allocation, lowering the company’s expenses by 20%.
#4. Data Visualization
These skills include the ability to present data in a visually clear and compelling manner. It implies creating graphs, charts, dashboards, and similar visual data representations.
An image often speaks more than a thousand words and surely more than a pile of numbers. Therefore, this is an important skill as it helps you explain your insights to people who may need to become more familiar with your line of business.
Here’s an example of how to include data visualization skills in your business analyst skills resume:
Good Example
Data visualization: I created interactive dashboards to monitor trends and workflow patterns, which resulted in a 30% reduction in report submission time.
#5. Business Intelligence Tools
Business intelligence tools are software applications for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data. Processing data is a big part of a business analyst’s job, so being skilled at using these tools is a significant advantage. To demonstrate your proficiency in using such tools, name the tools you used and how they contributed to your work.
Here is an idea of how to do it:
Good Example
Business Intelligence Tools: I am proficient in using Power B, QlikView, and Tableau. I used them to create powerful visualizations of results and interactive dashboards, which helped the senior management make data-driven strategic decisions.
#6. Communication
Communication skills involve many abilities that allow you to connect and exchange information with other people efficiently. Instead of listing communication as a skill, you can make a separate section that will include more specific communication skills that you have developed, such as:
Good Example
Building relationships
Public Speaking
Presentation
Charing meetings
Feel free to include as many specific communication skills as you want, as long as they reflect your real abilities and experience, and ensure you include a brief example of how you used them. You can do it this way:
Good Example
Presentation/public speaking skills: I regularly prepared and presented my business analysis insights and proposals for business process improvement to my team and senior management.
#7. Negotiation
Negotiation in the context of a business analyst role refers to controlling stakeholders' expectations, mediating and coordinating between various teams, and ensuring that the business analysis insights are treated with respect. You can include them in your resume and back them up with some examples like this:
Good Example
Negotiation: I successfully navigated the competing interests of the many stakeholders and was always able to present a solution beneficial to all parties involved.
#8. Interpersonal Skills
Business analysts are mostly focused on dealing with data, and that’s precisely why strong interpersonal skills can be what separates you from other candidates. They are crucial because they enable you to establish beneficial working relationships, facilitate communication with key stakeholders, and become more invested in projects as you form relationships with those who support them.
Here is how you can highlight interpersonal skills in your resume:
Good Example
Interpersonal skills: I successfully collaborated with multiple teams and developed constructive working relationships with key stakeholders to ensure the optimal execution of projects and streamlined communication.
#9. Critical Thinking
Since critical thinking is based on the capacity to analyze and evaluate data and make decisions objectively, it is a must-have business analyst's hard skill. A company can significantly benefit from the critical thinking abilities of business analysts who can grasp complex issues, locate causes, and effectively mitigate risks.
Let us look at how to incorporate these skills into your resume through an example:
Good Example
Critical thinking: While determining the underlying causes of increased transportation expanses, I demonstrated strong analytical reasoning and problem-solving skills, preventing further risks of this nature.
#10. Problem Solving
Problem-solving is an umbrella term that refers to various skills necessary for effectively addressing complex issues. It includes the ability to identify, analyze, and come up with solutions promptly. Business analysts are constantly challenged to propose such solutions; therefore, such skills are highly desirable.
Make sure you explain this skill well and back it up with an example in your resume. Here’s how:
Good Example
Problem-solving skills: I was tasked with identifying the root issue causing inefficiency in product development. After plunging, data-driven analysis, I recognized the root issue and devised a creative solution in line with the company’s strategic objectives, which improved process performance by 30%.
#11. Decision-Making
Making informed decisions requires weighing the pros and cons, developing deep insights, and projecting potential outcomes. Decision-making skills in business analysis refer to the ability to interpret data analysis and evaluate options while considering a variety of equally possible outcomes and proposing decisions that are in the company's best interests.
Here is an example of how to include them in the skills section:
Good Example
Decision-making skills: I successfully identified leading trends in the market and recommended adequate pricing strategies, which resulted in a xx% market share increase within x time.
How to Improve Your Business Analyst Skills
If you want to improve your business analyst skills, it is important to identify the exact area that needs the most improvement. The top 5 skills for business analysts include data analysis, critical thinking, communication, statistics, and probability, so you might want to check where you stand with these first.
Additionally, given that the field of business analysis is constantly evolving, you should think about implementing the following practices to ensure that you consistently follow market trends:
Tips to Enhance Business Analyst Skills
Become a member of professional associations, such as the International Institute of Business Analysis, for example. This way, you will have access to relevant resources and networking opportunities. By attending and participating in professional seminars and conferences, you will have the opportunity to exchange and enrich your knowledge.
Stay in touch with technological advances. Business analysis tools are constantly being improved and perfected. Make sure you take advantage of everything they can provide.
Keep learning. Enroll in relevant workshops and courses. They do much more than look good on a resume. Your experience and the theoretical knowledge you pick up will work together to give you unique advantages.
Closing Thoughts
Since businesses today are progressively changing in many aspects, keeping up with the competition is more challenging than ever. That’s precisely why business analyst skills are in such high demand.
So, as an aspiring business analyst, make sure you use all your skills to your advantage and put them to work while crafting your resume. Analyze your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your competition, and create an effective, data-driven strategy for impressing your potential employers!
