The groundwork of any successful company depends on their ability to give customer what they desire. It is true in case of both startups as well as established big industry players. And merely guesswork is not enough to find out what that is. That’s why business analytics is considered as a critical field because it facilitates companies to understand their users’ requirements.

In this article, you will get to know what business analytics is and why it is the highest paying skill of 2019.

In past few years, we have seen every area of society becoming victim to the necessity for data, technology, data and business analytics. Let’s understand what business analytics is.

Business Analytics

Business analytics is a process of understanding sense of collected data, measuring business performance, and generating valuable conclusions. It collectively can assist organizations make informed decisions on the future prospect of the business by using different statistical methods as well as techniques.

Difference between Business Analytics and Business Intelligence

People often get confused between business analytics and business intelligence. Though both of them have data in their prime focus, there is a significant difference between the two that we can understand. Business intelligence is associated with the collection of data, while the interest of business analytics is putting all that collected data into use.

Business intelligence is actually the first step towards comprehending the circumstances that the organization is currently in. It states the ‘what’ of the circumstance. Whereas Business analytics describes the ‘why’: it works as a bridge that joins the technical aspect of the business with the managerial, let’s say decision-making aspect of it.

Skills Required for Business Analyst

If you wish to become a business analyst, you need to possess the following skills:

  • Collaboration
  • Ability to drive impact
  • Ability to align with stakeholders
  • Working A/B testing skills

As you can observe, the skills are pretty general, and it does not require any advanced tech knowledge. Besides, the field of business analytics also come up with various jobs to select from.

What Arises the Need of Analytics? The world has always been dominated by data. However, if we look at history, the competition was not global like it is today. Companies could get success even if they did not have much understating of their past performance to get ready for future. Then, all you required was an interesting idea, a strong business sense and a good worker to make a living.

Things have changed now and everything is far more complicated than it used to be. While we are talking about ‘data’, we cannot stick to data only but also need to include the processing methods for it. Information in raw form is not valuable and it does not help in decision making either.

Therefore, it makes sense that with overflow of information, new jobs-mainly concentrated on the companies and analysis of data—have displayed on the business horizon. Similar is the case with business analysts.

Why to Pursue a Career in Business Analytics?

1. Gap between Supply and Demand As more organizations have started realizing the significance of big data relative to their success and competitiveness, business analytics has become one of the go-to jobs of this century. What makes following career in this field even more alluring is the fact that though the demand has steadily been increasing during the past couple of years, yet the supply side of the market has not been saturated.

2. Lack of Expertise A recent report states the importance of the business analytics as a career. It says that although each modern organization requires someone to take care of its data, there are not many professionals who can offer expert services to the companies to meet their demands. Hence, opportunities tend to get higher.

3. An Easy Switch from Other Careers Unlike different other professions, your background and past experiences actually do not matter in the path of career in business analytics. Analytics can be implemented to any domain, be it sports, entertainment, manufacturing, education, insurance, automotive, banking, or elsewhere, which makes it widely applicable and easy switch from different other careers.

4. A Dynamic Career Business analysts do not take any day as ‘normal’ day. They consistently face different challenges because they operate in different environments and meet clients with particular needs. Hence, business analysts constantly need to learn new things and find various techniques that produce more effective as well as innovative solutions to a variety of complex problems.

5. Room for Professional Development The nature of the job also urges business analysts to stay in touch with people from various departments, with different skills and expertise. It further enhances their knowledge of how an organization and each one of its departments, operates.

Let’s have a deeper look into how business analytics can actually help a company. Analyzing data enables understanding of both the industry and business in which it works, making sure that an organization is able to make choices which assists them grow.

More particularly, business analytics offers:

Clarity- It gives clarity to the company to help it understand where it stands in the industry or a specific niche. This clarity helps in developing effective strategies to position itself far better in the future.

Competitiveness-If an organization does not analyze the huge chunks of data it is exposed to, it might lack in information, and will not be able to compete in future.

Timeliness-A clear insight into every aspect of the business specifically empowers easy and fast decision-making which yields positive outcomes.

So, are you ready to embark on a career journey where opportunities abound!