Picking the right domain to kick-start your business analyst career is unavoidable! There are no specific criteria to count on: the best or worst! But you often choose to depend upon the increase in demand related to a business analyst’s job execution. Some of the popular domains are e-commerce, insurance, and finance.
The expertise area for each domain is different, and a business analyst aspirant should have the necessary knowledge to get into it. The article here will discuss the top category of domains and their sub-category to help you choose the one that suits your set of knowledge and expertise.
A business analyst can be one of the four types: pure business analysts, IT business analysts, middleware analysts, and system analysts.
When analysts work within a specific domain, they will understand the company’s needs and tally them with that customer satisfaction. As a result, they will contribute to raising the company’s profit bars. But the condition is that one should have sufficient knowledge of one or more domains that are permitted for business analysts to pick a career.
Follow this article till the end to get a clear exposure to the domains that are best suitable for business analysts. After that, you can eventually decide on choosing one that would make you thrive in your career!
1. The Business Industry Domain
The business industry domain explains the general activity area of all companies that fall under a specific category. For instance, the e-commerce business domain has companies under it, such as Amazon, Walmart, eBay, etc. Some companies also have the feasibility to operate within multiple business domains.
Some of the trending business industry domains suitable for business analysts are as follows:
- Banking & Finance
If you choose this domain, you will be working in a bank to understand the entire process and needs of the company. You need to work on finding the improvement areas, get funding/approval for respective projects and make the requirements available for IT clients. As a business analyst working in Banking & Finance domain, you will be the prime point of contact for the IT clients to solve their queries regarding the banking process.
- E-Commerce
Ecommerce is a booming industry in the present era. With the Pandemic and lockdown situations worldwide, the eCommerce sector has picked up the sales pace. Many business analysts would blindly turn up for this domain, as the business peak for this industry is highly predictable. But even though it is predictable, it is still one of the most challenging domains for business analysts to work with. It is because the necessity for analytical skills is high for this domain compared to others.
- Telecommunication
A techno-functional domain that is substantially growing on global levels. If someone with an engineering background is willing to be a business analyst in the telecommunication domain, they might be a perfect fit for the job. It is because a technical background is important for understanding the complete execution process in this field. The industries or companies also hire business analysts with a technical background.
- Insurance
Insurance companies rely upon proficient business analysts to determine consumer and client needs. They do the job of recommending services and products to clients and consumers based on their specific requirements. They also take responsibility for evaluating the overall organizational cost of employees and work on enhancing operational efficiency. Analysts within the insurance domain also prepare documentation, execute requirement elicitation, gather requirements, validate & coordinate, and do many other things to make the company & industry thrive.
- Fintech
Fintech business analysts have the potential to manage respective projects, develop new project plans, and monitor the performance of existing ones. They serve as the liaison between users and stakeholders. The business analysts within the Fintech domain will monitor the deliverables and ensure the timely execution of all projects. For specific Fintech roles, they adapt visualization jobs over the finance domain for several functions. Based upon the observation, they suggest what they can do and the process of acquiring the goals.
- IT Industry
The IT industry has been quite stable over the last decade, and there is no scope for a halt to technological advancements. Therefore, the business analysts need to be ready with the knowledge of all aspects, which is essential within the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). Apart from that, the business analysts who are keen to take on this domain should master soft skills and data modeling as a priority as well.
- Healthcare
Healthcare is one of the biggest domains, which has witnessed substantial growth in the past years. For becoming a business analyst within this domain, you must have specific knowledge of the healthcare industry and how it executes its business. You can step into this challenging domain for proficient analysis only if you clearly understand how the industry functions.
- Travel Industry
The travel industry domain needs more management skills than that analysis. But the business analysts choosing this domain should be proficient in both skill demands. Companies in this industry mostly prefer MBA graduates with basic business analysis skills. You have to analyze the customer preferences for travel, decide on peak and off times and plan out business strategies to promote profitability. All of this need’s backend management skills that an MBA graduate is most likely to have!
Advantages & Disadvantages
Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages for you to get adequate knowledge before deciding upon choosing business industry domains:
Advantages:
- Specific domains have characterized the roles and necessities for business analysts to carry out their seamless job.
- It adds up options for business analyst career aspirants to make their individual choice for entering into the domain that fits their educational and skill qualifications.
- Companies will train you more to learn analysis over carrying out the management roles in the initial period. If you have prior experience in your chosen domain, they will count it as an additional qualification and increase your pay scale accordingly.
Disadvantages:
- Every domain is a challenge in itself! You cannot just choose the trending domain to get easily predictable analysis outputs. The management and process execution tasks will get difficult in a trending domain. The bigger the profits, the higher the work pressure and demands.
2. The Systems Domain
The systems domain category for business analysts demands the necessity of working upon user data and requests simultaneously. They are destined to evaluate the gathered information from several resources and indicate quality upon final analysis. In the system’s domain, business analysts need to communicate complex data comprehensively. The CRMs and Cloud Infrastructure are running most of the businesses today! Therefore, business analysts are essential in determining, evaluating, and implementing business metrics. They should meet the customer information and organizational needs.
Here is a brief explanation of CRM and Cloud Infrastructure sub-domains within the category:
- CRM Business Analyst
The companies, consulting firms, and organizations are filling the strong positions of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) business analysts. The companies offering services such as building and managing customer relationships will need analysts with knowledge of market research and customer service.
They will be responsible for collecting customer data, managing data, monitoring the marketing campaign responses, and analyzing the customer purchase history. CRM business analysts on priority give many more roles. Some of the common CRM platforms on which the analysts mostly work is Workday and Salesforce.
- Cloud Infrastructure
The business analysts working within the cloud infrastructure domain, such as AWS, are responsible for handling several core jobs. They are handed over the responsibility for, identifying the cloud practices, redefining the business processes, identifying & communicating with stakeholders, managing legacy products, handling transformation requirements, etc. They are also part of an innovation team, as it is key to keep thriving in the cloud world.
Advantages & Disadvantages
Here are the advantages and disadvantages of the Systems Domain for you to count on:
Advantages:
- You get a better pay scale as the responsibilities have increased.
- The experience in CRM and Cloud Infrastructure management & analysis is very accountable for my long-term career.
- With excellent knowledge of the subject, you will be able to predict the accurate expectation of customers and clients. It will help you improve the services or products that the company has to offer.
Disadvantages:
- The data-oriented responsibilities will be high. Therefore, apart from having just business strategizing skills, a business analyst with a systems domain perspective should have skills in handling lots of data and deriving business opportunities. It is a job of high effort, which also gets a good salary compensation.
3. Skills Domain
- UI Business Analyst
The business analyst in the UI domain has perfect design, which adds value to the entire project building purpose. Some of the roles that the UI business analyst has to serve are understanding the product, in-depth research, usability, navigation, organization branding, testing, feedback, and user acceptance. There are no specific guidelines on what the UI business analysts should do! They can explore the perfect opportunities by staying in constant communication with business operations and UI designers.
- Data & Process Maps Analyst
Process mapping is the visual representation of necessary steps essential for completing a project. Analysts have the role of process mapping to carry out the job of drawing concise sequence pictures of all tasks. It is essential for bringing a service or product from scratch to completion. There is also a data mapping necessity that comes along with it.
Here, the analyst will be matching the fields of one database with that of the other. Hence, this is the initial step of facilitating proper data migration, management tasks, and integration. Before the data is ready for analysis, you should get it properly uniformed. You should then make it accessible to your business decision-makers.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Skills Domain
The below points will help you better understand the career potential of business analysts in the skills domain.
Advantages:
- You get to work on projects right from their foundation base.
- The work effort is less, as you need to look after seamless work execution of your work team mostly. Your job is to test and find the flaws (if any) and collaborate to deliver seamless project execution.
- The decision-makers of business will rely mostly upon you. You will give the necessary data and a proper explanation of the ongoing projects. You will be an important role player in helping the business grow.
Disadvantages:
- The pay scale is considerably less than other domains listed in this article.
Conclusion
Acquisition of expertise in the respective domain is a gradual process. And no one can master it on a quick note. Therefore, you must just have the basic knowledge of the preferable domain and get into the work zone. Gradually, you will learn all the nooks & corners of this field and will have professional experience in standing out.
There are business analysts who prefer to switch domains with experience in hand. The companies accept this switch because they trust the person and not just the domain knowledge they currently pursue. Business analysts who are good at what they do mostly have an analytical mindset and approach. And that is what strengthens them to step out and learn new domains at ease.
You will take less time to master the domain, as the initial adaptation process remains the same for all domains listed above. You eventually get along with your same role in a different domain when you do your groundwork right. So, gather all the knowledge you can in these domains and take your career decision patiently. Keep your qualifications in mind while you decide upon a specific business analyst domain.
