Hello and welcome to the course Product Management: Business KPIs & User Metrics analysis.
In this course, you will learn
#1 - How to look at user metrics & business KPIs
…
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Written byBrennan Whitfield
UPDATED BY
Brennan Whitfield | Dec. 09, 2022
What Is a Business Analyst? How to Become One, Salary, Skills.
Business analysts apply data analytics techniques to evaluate business data and make company-wide decisions. Here’s what to know about a business analyst’s needed skills, salary and how to become one.
What Is a Business Analyst?
Business analysts conduct data analysis, extract insights and help apply findings to foster company growth. They are largely responsible for identifying long-term goals and key performance indicators, making them key stakeholders for an organization.
What Do Business Analysts Do?
Business analysts interpret past and current business data to determine profit opportunities and suggest improvements for certain operations. Though similar to data analysts, business analysts mainly use data for commercial and management needs instead of data structure and flow needs.
Business Analyst Responsibilities
- Analyze data and uncover insights that can drive business success and scalability.
- Build financial models to assess projected business outcomes.
- Conduct financial forecasting and budgeting analysis for business decisions.
- Compile and visualize findings into charts, graphs and presentations.
- Design business structures and possible needs delegation.
Day-to-Day Responsibilities of Business Analysts
- Use spreadsheet and database tools like Microsoft Excel to dissect large data sets.
- Use financial modeling tools like Jirav to combine spreadsheet data and forecast cash flow.
- Use data visualization tools like Microsoft Power BI to present insight findings.
- Communicate findings to finance, HR, marketing or product professionals.
Business Analysts Within a Company
Business analysts are usually part of a business intelligence, business development or data science team. They may collaborate with data analysts and financial analysts to accomplish their work, and tend to report to senior or principal business analysts.
Importance of Business Analyst
Business analysts aim to decrease decision costs and risk as well as increase business efficiency. Certain operations may not be properly optimized or may not reach business goals without business analysts.
What Skills Are Needed to Be a Business Analyst?
Qualifications to Be a Business Analyst
- Internship and/or on-the-job training experience in data analytics, business intelligence or information technology (IT).
- Ability to prepare, mine and visualize data findings.
- Ability to conduct statistical analysis to understand business metrics.
- Proficiency in Python, R and SQL for query and analytics purposes.
Business Analyst Prerequisites
- Bachelor’s degree in business administration, finance, IT or a similar field.
- Master’s degree in business administration (MBA), business intelligence, data science or a similar field.
Business Analyst Hard Skills
- Data and budgeting analysis expertise.
- Programming language competency and capabilities (Python, R, SQL).
- Experience implementing data analysis tools and techniques.
- Financial modeling and forecasting tool experience.
- Data visualization tool familiarity and use.
- Expertise in applied statistics and related analysis.
- Knowledge of big data tools and databases.
- Cloud computing technical knowledge.
- Familiarity with machine learning technologies and analysis use cases.
Business Analyst Soft Skills
- Critical thinking skills.
- Detail-oriented skills.
- Problem-solving skills.
- Verbal and written communication skills.
Tools and Programs Business Analysts Use
How to Become a Business Analyst
Business Analyst Education and Experience
Business analyst candidates are often expected to have a bachelor’s degree in business administration, finance, IT or a similar field. A master’s degree in business administration (MBA), business intelligence, data science or a similar field also may be required for entering advanced roles.
Candidates will often need to obtain applicable business intelligence or analytics experience through an internship, on-the-job training and/or work experience. Knowledge in the areas of data and budgeting analysis, data visualization, programming languages (Python, R, SQL), statistical analysis and effective communication are also recommended.
Business Analyst Certificates and Courses
- Beginner to Pro in Excel: Financial Modeling and Valuation
- Data Analytics Bootcamp
- Learning Python for Data Analysis and Visualization
- SQL - MySQL for Data Analytics and Business Intelligence
Business Analyst Career Path
After gaining experience as a business analyst, professionals can move into a senior business analyst role or related roles like financial analyst or operations analyst. From here, professionals may progress into management and leadership roles like principal business analyst or director of business intelligence and analytics.
Business Analyst Salary and Job Outlook
Business analyst roles, falling under the category of management analysts by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, are expected to increase 11 percent by 2031.
The full compensation package for a business analyst depends on a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s experience and geographic location. See below for detailed information on the average business analyst salary.
Courses
Expand Your Business Analyst Career Opportunities
Learn new data science skills with expert-led courses from Udemy.
Certifications
Business Analyst Certifications + Programs
Prove your capabilities by earning a data science certification from Udacity.
Whether you have coded before or are brand new to the world of programming, this course will put you on the fast track to building confidence with this intuitive, object- oriented language. Learn programming fundamentals and build a custom application. Graduate with the ability to start applying Python within high-growth fields like analytics, data science, and web development.
What you'll accomplish
This is a beginner-friendly program with no prerequisites, although some students may have coded previously. First-time programmers will have access to pre-course preparatory lessons and additional resources to boost their confidence with key concepts and set up their development environments. Throughout this expert-designed program, you’ll:
- Learn object-oriented programming fundamentals and Python basics that get you coding from day one.
- Build a Python program and add on increased complexity throughout the course.
- Troubleshoot Python code and practice common debugging techniques.
- Push your skills to the next level by adding scripting, modules, and APIs to your Python toolkit.
- Explore introductory data science and web development as potential career directions for Python programmers.
- Demonstrate your Python skills by creating apps that pull in data with Pandas or integrate functionality from APIs with Flask.
Why General Assembly
Since 2011, General Assembly has graduated more than 40,000 students worldwide from the full time & part time courses. During the 2020 hiring shutdown, GA's students, instructors, and career coaches never lost focus, and the KPMG-validated numbers in their Outcomes report reflect it. *For students who graduated in 2020 — the peak of the pandemic — 74.4% of those who participated in GA's full-time Career Services program landed jobs within six months of graduation. General Assembly is proud of their grads + teams' relentless dedication and to see those numbers rising. Download the report here.
Your next step? Submit an application to talk to the General Assembly Admissions team
Note: reviews are referenced from Career Karma - https://careerkarma.com/schools/general-assembly
General Assembly
General Assembly’s Data Analytics Immersive is designed for you to harness Excel, SQL, and Tableau to tell compelling stories with a data driven strategy. This program was created for analysts, digital marketers, sales managers, product managers, and data novices looking to learn the essentials of data analysis.
What you'll accomplish
You will learn to use industry tools, Excel, and SQL to analyze large real world data sets and create data dashboards and visualizations to share your findings. The Data Analytics Accelerator culminates in a.
Throughout this expert-designed program, you’ll:
- Use Excel, SQL, and Tableau to collect, clean, and analyze large data sets.
- Present data-driven insights to key stakeholders using data visualization and dashboards.
- Tell compelling stories with your data.
- Graduate with a professional portfolio of projects that includes a capstone project applying rigorous data analysis techniques to solve a real-world problem
Why General Assembly
Since 2011, General Assembly has graduated more than 40,000 students worldwide from the full time & part time courses. During the 2020 hiring shutdown, GA's students, instructors, and career coaches never lost focus, and the KPMG-validated numbers in their Outcomes report reflect it. *For students who graduated in 2020 — the peak of the pandemic — 74.4% of those who participated in GA's full-time Career Services program landed jobs within six months of graduation. General Assembly is proud of their grads + teams' relentless dedication and to see those numbers rising. Download the report here.
Your next step? Submit an application to talk to the General Assembly Admissions team
Note: reviews are referenced from Career Karma - https://careerkarma.com/schools/general-assembly
General Assembly
General Assembly’s Data Science Immersive is a transformative course designed for you to get the necessary skills for a data scientist role in three months.
The Data Science bootcamp is led by instructors who are expert practitioners in their field, supported by career coaches that work with you since day one and enhanced by a career services team that is constantly in talks with employers about their tech hiring needs.
What you'll accomplish
As a graduate, you will be ready to succeed in a variety of data science and advanced analytics roles, creating predictive models that drive decision-making and strategy throughout organizations of all kinds. Throughout this expert-designed program, you’ll:
- Collect, extract, query, clean, and aggregate data for analysis.
- Gather, store and organize data using SQL and Git.
- Perform visual and statistical analysis on data using Python and its associated libraries and tools.
- Craft and share compelling narratives through data visualization.
- Build and implement appropriate machine learning models and algorithms to evaluate data science problems spanning finance, public policy, and more.
- Compile clear stakeholder reports to communicate the nuances of your analyses.
- Apply question, modeling, and validation problem-solving processes to data sets from various industries to provide insight into real-world problems and solutions.
- Prepare for the world of work, compiling a professional-grade portfolio of solo, group, and client projects.
Why General Assembly
Since 2011, General Assembly has graduated more than 40,000 students worldwide from the full time & part time courses. During the 2020 hiring shutdown, GA's students, instructors, and career coaches never lost focus, and the KPMG-validated numbers in their Outcomes report reflect it. *For students who graduated in 2020 — the peak of the pandemic — 74.4% of those who participated in GA's full-time Career Services program landed jobs within six months of graduation. General Assembly is proud of their grads + teams' relentless dedication and to see those numbers rising. Download the report here.
Your next step? Submit an application to talk to the General Assembly Admissions team
Note: reviews are referenced from Career Karma - https://careerkarma.com/schools/general-assembly
General Assembly
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