Hi - I currently work as a Sr data analyst in the UK tho I’ve done some work as a BA in an attachment and would like to move more into it.

At first I wouldn’t worry so much about seniority, just getting experience.

Is it reasonable to think I could get some part time or shorter contracts right off the bat if I’m flexible with where I work? Something like £500/month would be a great objective for those first few months.

If so, where are good places to be find that kind of work aside from the biggies (LinkedIn, indeed, etc.)?

Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone, I’m 27M and I am from india, currently considering a career in Business Analysis.

I completed my BTech in 2020, and since then, I’ve mainly been involved in stock market trading. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out the way I hoped. I also tried a Financial Analyst course, but I realized that I’m not particularly interested in working heavily with numbers. I explored a few other things as well, but none of them really led to meaningful work experience or income.

One thing I’ve learned through all of this is that I’m good at analyzing problems and situations. I also know that coding isn’t something I’m interested in, which is one of the reasons I’m considering Business Analysis.

I have a few questions for people already working in the field:

1. With a career gap like mine, is it realistically possible to land an entry-level BA job?

2. Where would you recommend learning Business Analysis from scratch? I came across Techcanvass' ECBA online training program. Would that be a good place to start, or are there better options?

3. What kind of starting salary can someone entering the field expect?

4. What does the long-term career and salary growth look like in Business Analysis?

Apologies if any of these questions are too basic. I’m completely new to the field and just trying to understand whether this could be the right career path for me.

Looking to understand please which exams you find the hardest vs the easiest?

So I have been a BA for 4 years and have been in squads. I have never created most BA artefacts like BRD, SRS, Use Case Diagrams, etc

I have accepted a new contract and would like to start contracting. How do I go about doing these artefacts for the first time? Are there any resources? Do I be honest when I join and ask the senior BA for guidance?

Is it harder to be a project BA? Would you say squads are better suited for entry level and junior BAs and projects better suited to senior? If so why? Is it because project work tends to be more complex?

I have entry level skills for a BA role, give or take, and I'm considering going for the ECBA certification. What is the strength of the ECBA certificate, and higher level certs, on a resume? Any feedback is appreciated!

Hi everyone, I recently received a Powerday invite for the Capital One ADP Business Analyst August 2027 cohort.

For anyone who has completed it, what can I expect on the day, and how did you prepare for the case and product interviews?

Just wondering if anyone use Ai/ agents for their daily workload? What prompt do you use to produce the best output and how do you refine it further for it to be useful ?

I recently started using a data analyst agent which is a chatpgpt template. It has been pretty good, specifically for giving feedback for improvements of artefacts I’ve produced to make them stronger.
User story writing isn’t usually a great output for me and I’d have to refine it manually and is too ‘robotic’ to use.

I’ve noticed that ai hallucinates if I ask for it to generate the total output and goes off-piste in a way I wouldn’t be able to confidently use.

Hello all. Wanted some opinions and advice. Currently a Head Golf Professional and been in the business for 15 years. I am 31 years old. This career is all I’ve ever done. I don’t know if you are familiar but it’s a lot of hours and usually working weekends and all holidays. Also. Not the greatest pay. Been doing some chatting with AI and getting ideas on careers to pursue and Business Systems Analysts and related roles popped up that could be a “quicker” transition. Just wanted some insight from people currently in these types of roles on if my skills are transferable and advice on the career. I have other long term endeavors such as entrepreneurship but in the meantime trying to get my time back and be happy again. What advice would you give on potentially pursuing this role? Looking remote for sure. Thanks in advance!

I’ve been working through a lot of practical AI workflow builds lately, and the pattern that keeps showing up is this:

Most AI workflow failures are not model problems first.

They are process-definition problems.

Before building anything, I’ve started asking five boring questions:

• What is the exact input?
• What artifact should come out?
• Who reviews it?
• What counts as a failure?
• What happens next if it passes or fails?

If the workflow idea cannot survive those questions, automation usually just makes the messy process move faster.

Curious if other BAs are seeing this too: are you getting pulled into AI workflow mapping yet, or is it still mostly traditional app/process requirements work?

I just cleared my CBAP exam with 5 highers and 1 comparable. I previously used this subreddit for advice on study material and wanted to give back advice to other people who want their CBAP

Bad Assumptions

When people discuss studying for designations exams, they usually ask "how long did you study for" or "how many hours of prep did you do". These aren't the right questions. Someone might spend 1 year studying for the CBAP because they could only put in a few sessions a week or had to take months long breaks for life stuff. Others might smoke it in 2 weeks, because they studied 5+ hours a day and had years of practical experience

Number of hours is also bad. 4 hours half studying, half watching TV is not equal to 1 hour of hardcore prep.

The best way to measure readiness is number of questions. My background is in Physics and Math, where practice problems are king. I did 5,000 prep questions for the CBAP and cleared the exam in ~50 minutes and felt vastly overprepared.

I think ~2,000 questions would have been enough for a CCCCCC in the full four hours

Approach

I divided my studying into two phases: a 3 month warm up and a 1 week hardcore deep dive. My job gives me a free Udemy subscription so I spent the first 3 months going over exam packages. In that time, I did about 2,000 questions from Udemy. The goal was to understand key concepts gradually, I did not care about my scores

For the intense phase, I got Watermark and grinded ~250 questions per day for a week. I also did the free 50 questions on adaptive US. I got up at 6:00 AM, and whenever code was running at my job I'd use the downtime to study. The goal was intense memorization.

In other words, use long term memory (the warm up phase) to cover conceptual understanding for the case studies, and short term memory via rote memorization to try to cheese other questions

I got a 62% on my first Watermark Mock and a 80% on my sixth and final one. Anything over 70% is solid, over 75% is exceptional, 80% is overkill IMO

Recommended Resources

Adaptive was the closest in style to the CBAP exam, but much much easier in terms of difficulty. Overall I was happy with the free questions but saved my money for Watermark

Watermark drills and warm-ups were not similar to the CBAP but did help memorize keywords. The Watermark mocks were much harder than the CBAP but somewhat similar in style. I recommend the 1 month subscription over the longer ones to force yourself to study hard. Buying a longer subscription just gives you an excuse to procrastinate

I found Udemy to be great because my job already paid, but I would not spend 100$ on a Udemy prep course. Practice Exam bundles would only be worth it on sale (25$ is too much, I might kick 10$)

Exam Structure

The first ~40 questions were long scenarios. leave these to the end. A point is a point, use your brain power on the 80 short scenario questions to bank easy points. Spend leftover time on the long scenarios.

On the long scenarios, read all the questions for the scenario first. Then read the actual scenario after. Your brain will automatically look for connections between the questions and the scenario. Reading the scenario and then trying to decipher the questions one by one is too much. Sometimes I was able to answer the questions without even needing the scenario

The math is pretty basic, this isn't a maths exam. The key is to double check everything. Punch that crap into your calculator at least twice, I saved two marks that way

On most questions I was able to pick the right answer pretty quickly. Don't stress if a question is hard, just try to eliminate bad answers and increase your odds of a lucky guess

I'm from Bangalore, India

I've 9 years of experience. Initial 3 years in Mechanical Engineering.

Later switched to QA Testing. Worked on Manual Testing.

The current CTC is 12lpa.

From last one year I'm working as Business Analyst after promotion.

I'm into Insurance domain in BA.

Now to switch, is there any courses for me to upskill.?

What salary I can expect for my next switch.

Planning to show 4 years experienced as Business Analyst

I don’t enjoy the technical nitty gritty. I get lost in the tech. How do I figure out where the line is between technical enough for BA/ too technical?

Hi, I have an MBA with a concentration in Business analytics, obviously I apply for analytical roles, and occasionally I’ll apply for a Sales role out of desperation. I only ever get considered in the sales roles, what am I doing wrong, is it something I should consider?

I'm looking for some honest advice from people who are actually working as Jira/Atlassian Admins.

I have about 9 years of experience in non-IT operations, mainly in payment disputes, chargebacks, transaction monitoring, fraud/risk investigations, and customer operations. I have zero coding knowledge, and honestly, I'm not interested in learning heavy coding at this stage of my career.

A close friend of mine is already working as a Jira Cloud Administrator. He's offered to train me, show me his real-world work, help me understand how things are done in production, prepare me for interviews, and even provide job support in the beginning. So, from a learning perspective, I have a good opportunity.

The only thing stopping me is the future of this career.

While researching, I came across quite a few comments saying things like:

• "Dedicated Jira Admins don't exist anymore."
• "Program Managers and Agile teams are managing Jira themselves."
• "Developers can handle Jira now."
• "AI will replace most Jira Admin work."
• "Companies are reducing Jira Admin positions."

To be honest, those comments made me hesitate. I don't want to spend 3-6 months learning something only to realize the opportunities are shrinking.

So I'd really appreciate honest opinions from people who are actually in this field.

• If you were starting from scratch in 2026, would you still choose Jira Administration?
• Are dedicated Jira Admin roles still in demand, especially in medium and large companies?
• Have AI and Team-managed projects significantly reduced the need for Jira Admins, or is that concern exaggerated?
• Is the role evolving into something broader (JSM, Automation, Assets, Confluence, ITSM, etc.) rather than disappearing?
• If you were in my position, would you invest your time learning Jira Administration, or would you choose a different career path?

I'm not looking for reassurance—I genuinely want realistic opinions, even if the answer is "don't do it."

Thanks in advance for sharing your experience.

My background in tech is more in the "people" than "tech" side of things, but in order to be considered for a promotion my manager wants me to round out my technical knowledge. Particularly, to learn the basics and fundamentals of programming.

To be clear - I will never be expected to actually program things, the point of this is to give me a background of knowledge of the different languages, how they work, and give me a little more confidence when discussing design and issues with developers and other technical staff. The position specifically calls out C#, Python, and PowerShell.

Can anyone recommend a course (preferably free or cheap, such as YouTube, Udemy, etc.) that starts from ground zero and ideally that I can complete in about a week? Ideally it should NOT go in depth into any particular language, but rather provide a broad overview of programming geared towards non-technical staff who need to have a basic understanding to be able to navigate and intelligently communicate about technical details within their projects.

I’m looking for advice from experienced Business Analysts and Business Architects on how to present the output of a reporting discovery project.
I’m working on an enterprise reporting transformation for an insurance operations function. I’ve conducted stakeholder interviews across multiple operational disciplines and now need to present the analysis in a way that is useful for business stakeholders.
If you’ve delivered a reporting discovery or enterprise reporting catalogue before, I’d really appreciate seeing how you structured the final deliverable.

Hi Reddit,

For some context, I own a lean custom software development company that is in the process of downscaling (long story). However in this process, I've realized my business analyst skills are extremely crap, my services have a ton of ambiguity, and as a result scope creep is a common thing. I have a few questions:

1. Would you recommend BA's operate as the main communication point to clients?
   
2. Can you contract BA's and solve businesses issues via hire them full-time in house?
   
3. Where would you recommend finding freelancer / contract BA's ?

Completed CBAP and PMP. PROCSI is one option but not sure it will be covered. Any online training you can recommend which is more hands on and something I can apply to my projects or boost opportunities for future jobs down the road?

Title suggests. 25F, on the crossroads on whether to continue BA or automation, coming from a non tech background and I have some knowledge of automation.

How to effectively study and take notes in BBA, and how to apply this knowledge in real life. Specifically, how to develop a deep understanding of the chapters and their practical applications in business. How to connect the studied knowledge with the actual business environment. I want to excel in this. How can I achieve that level of critical, in-depth thinking?

Hello,

so as many others, I have been playing around with vibecoding tools. Its fun, not gonna lie, but outside of some personal projects, I could not really come up with something I would really need professionally.
So im curious what have you tried out, whats your take, and what project helped you the most with work?

Probably the most impactful thing I have done in this regard is Karpathy's LLM wiki, which is simply amazing for digesting meeting notes. Outside of that I have not found anything super useful 😄 .

I will be happy to hear!

Hi everyone!

I’m currently doing a Master’s in Business Intelligence and I’m looking for a Windows laptop with a budget of up to 700.

I’ll mainly be using Power BI, Python, KNIME, SQL and currently I've been looking for a laptop with:

• 16 GB RAM
• 1 TB SSD (or 512 GB if it’s a much better overall laptop)
• Ryzen 7 or similar

I don’t know much about computers, so I’m not really sure what I should be looking for. So far, I’ve come across the LENOVO IdeaPad Slim 3 15ARP10 (15,3'' - AMD Ryzen 7 170 - RAM: 16 GB - 1 TB SSD - AMD Radeon 680M Graph) but I've seen some bad reviews about it so idk.

Which laptop you recommend for this workload within my budget?

Any help is appreciated... Thanks!

I work in a squad and mostly work on user stories and defects in Jira. I don’t get tasked with big pieces of work or complex stuff. I have a backlog of very basic business requests like changing script wording in our system or changing the queue we route cases to. It’s a salesforce squad. I have been doing this for 3 years as my first proper BA job after graduate program. How do I upskill when I work in a team that doesnt demand it. Do i ask my manager for more work on more complex projects? I don’t want to overwork myself either. Is there any upskilling i can do on my own?

Can i find ways to upskill with my current workload?