Analytical Skills for Business Analyst

As a business analyst, you’re responsible for understanding the needs of your organization and its stakeholders, and finding solutions to meet those needs. While technical skills are undoubtedly important for the role, it’s equally important to develop and refine your soft skills. Soft skills are the personal attributes that enable you to communicate effectively, work well with others, and navigate complex situations.

Here are some soft skills that every business analyst should cultivate.

• Communication skills
• Problem Solving skills
• Adaptability skills
• Time Management skills
• Collaboration skills
• Leadership skills
• Emotional Intelligence skills
• Interpersonal skills
• Attention to detail
• Critical Thinking
• Teamwork
• Analytical reasoning,
• Negotiation skills
• Persuasion
• Conflict resolution

Here i will discuss about Analytical reasoning skills needed to become a business analyst.

As a business analyst, having strong analytical skills is crucial to success in the role.

“Analytical skills allow you to effectively gather, analyze, and interpret data to identify business problems and opportunities, and make informed recommendations for improvement.

• The cerebral cortex is responsible for analytical thinking in the human brain.

In this blog post, we'll discuss what analytical skills are, why they're important for business analysts, and some tips on how to improve your analytical skills.

What are Analytical Skills?

“Analytical skills are the ability to collect, analyze, and interpret information in order to make informed decisions.” These skills involve the ability to think critically, identify patterns and trends, and draw logical conclusions.

In a business context, analytical skills are essential for making strategic decisions that can drive growth, improve operational efficiency, and increase profitability. They involve analyzing data from various sources, identifying key trends and insights, and presenting the findings to key stakeholders.

Why are Analytical Skills Important for Business Analysts?

Business analysts are responsible for analyzing data to help organizations make informed decisions. Analytical skills are critical to this process because they enable business analysts to:

• Collect and Analyze Data: Business analysts need to be able to collect data from various sources, including databases, spreadsheets, and data visualization tools, and analyze it to identify trends, patterns, and insights.
• Identify Problems: Analytical skills enable business analysts to identify problems within an organization by analyzing data and identifying areas of inefficiency or low performance.
• Develop Solutions: Business analysts use analytical skills to develop solutions to the problems they have identified. This involves analyzing data to identify potential solutions and evaluating the impact of each solution on the organization.
• Communicate Findings: Analytical skills enable business analysts to communicate their findings to stakeholders in a clear and concise manner. This involves using data visualization and storytelling techniques to convey information in a way that is easily understandable and actionable.

How to Develop Analytical Skills?

Developing analytical skills is a process that takes time and effort. Here are some steps you can take to develop your analytical skills as a business analyst:

Gain Technical Skills: Business analysts need to be proficient in using tools such as spreadsheets, databases, and data visualization software. You can develop these skills through online courses, training programs, or by working on projects that require data analysis.

Practice Critical Thinking: Critical thinking involves questioning assumptions, considering different perspectives, and evaluating evidence to make informed decisions. You can practice critical thinking by reading articles, attending seminars, or engaging in discussions with colleagues.

Use Data to Solve Problems: One of the best ways to develop analytical skills is to use data to solve real-world problems. This involves analyzing data to identify problems, developing solutions, and evaluating the impact of those solutions.

Improve Communication Skills: Communication skills are critical for business analysts because they need to be able to communicate their findings to stakeholders in a clear and concise manner. You can improve your communication skills by practicing public speaking, writing reports, or creating presentations.

Stay Curious: The most successful business analysts are curious and constantly seek out new information and knowledge. Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in your industry by reading books, attending conferences, and networking with colleagues.

Core Business Analytics Skills

The big data landscape has changed drastically, making it tough for professionals to know where to focus their growth. However, despite this changing field, there are a number of core business analytics skills that form the foundation of any solid business analytics career.

A great business analytics professional could be described as:

• A good communicator:Being able to present findings in a clear and concise manner is fundamental to making sure that all players understand insights and can put recommendations into practice. People working in analysis must be able to tell a story with data through strong writing and presentation skills.

• Inquisitive:People in this field should have natural curiosity and drive to continue learning and figuring out how things fit together. Even as analysts become managers, it’s important to stay in touch with the industry and its changes.

• Problem Solver:Professionals in analytics use a combination of logical thinking, predictive analytics and statistics to make recommendations that will solve problems and propel a business forward. In a profession that seeks to turn data into solutions, being a natural problem solver helps connect the dots.

• A critical thinker:Business analytics professionals need to think critically about not only the implications of the data they collect, but about what data they should be collecting in the first place. They are expected to analyze and highlight only the data that can be helpful in making decisions.
• A visualizer:Disorganized data doesn’t help anyone. To create worth from data, analytics professionals need to be able to translate and visualize data in a concise and accurate way that’s easy to digest.

Both detail-oriented and a big picture thinker

While business analytics professionals have to be able to handle complex data, they also need to understand how their recommendations will affect the bottom line of a business. There’s no point in having access to large quantities of information without knowing how it can be harnessed to analyze and improve tactics, processes and strategies.

Technical Skills for Business Analytics:

In a business landscape quickly becoming governed by big data, great analytics professionals are fulfilling the demand for technical expertise by wearing the hats of both developer and analyst.

Having both a conceptual and working understanding of tools and programming languages is important to translate data sources into tangible solutions.

Below are some of the top tools for business analytics professionals:

• SQL :SQL is the coding language of databases and one of the most important tools in an analytics professional’s toolkit. Professionals write SQL queries to extract and analyze data from the transactions database and develop visualizations to present to stakeholders.

• Statistical languages :The two most common programming languages in analytics are R, for statistical analysis, and Python, for general programming. Knowledge in either of these languages can be beneficial when analyzing big data sets, but is not vital.

• Statistical software:While the ability to program is helpful for a career in analytics, being able to write code isn’t necessarily required to work as an analytics professional. Apart from the above languages, statistical software such as SPSS, SAS, Sage, Mathematica, and even Excel can be used when managing and analyzing data.

The Four Types of Analytics:

These soft and hard business analytics skills can be utilized across different facets of business analytics, including:

• Descriptive Analytics:What’s happening to my business right now?By mining and aggregating raw data through a real-time dashboard, analytics professionals are able to gain comprehensive, accurate, in-the-moment analytics. While the practice of data mining is considered the least useful part of the big data value chain, it can still be helpful in identifying patterns of behavior that might influence future outcomes.
• Diagnostic Analytics:Why is it happening?Diagnostic analytics look at the past performance of campaigns and processes to determine what happened and why. It isolates all confounding information to identify an accurate cause-and-effect relationship.
• Predictive Analytics:What’s likely to happen in the future? Statistical models and forecasting techniques can be used to predict likely scenarios of what might happen based on insights from big data. This form of analytics can be used to support complex forecasts.
• Prescriptive Analytics:What do I need to do to succeed? Prescriptive analytics focuses on what actions should be taken. Where big data analytics can shed light on an area of business, prescriptive analytics gives you a much more focused answer to a specific question.

Regardless of which type of analytics you’re working in, being able to offer the above hard and soft skills makes a business analytics professional an invaluable part of any business.

As company leaders come to realize the potential impact of data on business strategy, so the number of jobs involving data analytics grows, creating strong demand for people with these talents. Business analytics professionals’ mix of technical and non-technical skills makes them uniquely qualified to provide businesses with the competitive edge so badly needed in a big data world.

In conclusion, analytical skills are essential for business analysts because they enable them to gather, analyze, and interpret data to make informed decisions. Developing these skills takes time and effort, but the payoff can be significant in terms of improved business outcomes and career advancement. By gaining technical skills, practicing critical thinking, using data to solve problems, improving communication skills, and staying curious, you can become a successful business analyst with strong analytical skills.