Data. Companies are surrounded by data that needs to be collected, segregated, analyzed, and interpreted to derive meaningful insights for the businesses.
The management and the stakeholders are a group of people who make the decisions related to the company’s performance and decide its future direction. The execution of these targets and goals lies on the employees or the teams.
Even though the teams and the management is working together towards a common goal, they speak different languages. The management speaks the language of finances, markets, and potentials; whereas the execution team understands the technical jargon better.
This gap is filled by a Business Analyst.
Business analytics (BA) is building analysis models and simulations to create situations, understand the actualities and predict future trends. Business analytics includes data mining, predictive analytics, applied analytics, and statistics.
It specializes in –
- Collecting and processing historical data
- Analysing the data to identify patterns, trends or predict future outcomes
- Represent the data in a visually appealing format that makes it easy to derive insights and take decisions.
- Business analytics techniques can be divided into 4 categories –
- Descriptive analytics – It involves decoding past data to identify trends or patterns.
- Predictive analytics – It uses data to predict future outcomes
- Diagnostic analytics – This includes analyzing the data to understand the pain areas
- Prescriptive analytics – It is the application of tools and techniques to derive potential scenarios in different situations.
According to a survey, 94% of companies around the world state that analytics and data-driven decision-making are important to their growth and digital transformation.
This indicates the importance of data analytics and signifies the correlation between data analytics and decision-making.
Analyzing large data and extracting useful information from it requires skilled professionals. The skills required to be a successful business analyst are –
- Problem-solving skills
- Interpersonal skills
- Business intelligence and statistical tools
- Understanding of databases and networks
- Stakeholder analysis
- Predictive analytics
- Cost-benefit analysis
- Data visualization techniques
- Basics of programming languages
- Understanding of business functions & processes
Analytics is utilized for deriving meaningful insights for various business functions and processes such as marketing, sales, HR, finance, etc. This opens avenues for freshers and experienced professionals alike in the field of business analytics. A few potential careers in this domain are –
- Data Scientist – Data Scientist breaks down large chunks of raw data to scoop out actionable insights.
- Research analyst – Using diagnostic techniques, a research analyst prepares an investigative report that helps companies make investment decisions in assets or securities.
- Financial Analyst – A financial analyst guides businesses through their financial decisions such as investments, buy/sell decisions, or pricing decisions. He also analyses the performance of the financial assets of the company.
- Marketing Analyst – The main job of a market analyst is to identify trends or patterns and predict future sales, and market movement, and explore potential markets.
- Data Architect – A data architect builds a database that can be accessed by the employees of the company from time to time.
Companies all over the world, big or small use data to transform their operations, understand the potential, take corrective actions, and plan their future strategies.
Hence synthesizing the data requires skill and offers numerous market opportunities for a skilled Business Analyst. The average salary of a BA ranges between Rs. 4 LPA to Rs. 15 LPA.
However, to thrive in the world of data analytics, one must possess the necessary skill set.
MIT School of Distance Education (MITSDE) understands the current skills gap in the market and strives hard to reduce it. Hence, MITSDE brings you PG Certificate in Business Analytics (PGCM Business Analytics).
The course covers data mining techniques, data interpretation & data visualization methods, and predictive modeling techniques. It also focuses on the application of analytics in various domains such as HR, Finance, Marketing & Supply chain.
