There are an incredible variety of business analyst course offerings and trainings (including ours, of course) – but what should YOU look for when evaluating training? In other words, have you defined your (in this case, training) requirements, and are they complete and accurate?

Here are two thought exercises that may help you define your requirements and determine which business analyst training courses are right for you. They will also help you ensure that the training courses you select truly meet all of your requirements.

Consider possible business objectives for training, such as:

Training to meet a requirement for professional advancement or promotion within your firm
Training for PDUs and other IIBA credits towards CBAP or CCBA certification
Training to ensure all business analysts on a team or a project speak the same language
Training to develop new business analyst skills within an organization

Consider a BA to have personal “functional” and “non-functional” requirements, and use these to help define your requirements.

A business analyst’s personal functional requirements might be extremely situation-based or project-based. For example, the use case for training for one BA might be to mature their skills, and thus support an overarching Business Analysts Center of Excellence initiative within their firm. Another BA’s main goal may result in them developing their elicitation and facilitation skills in order to successfully support the organization’s most complicated projects.

For a different BA, the functional requirements might be to improve their ability to use visual models for software requirements in order to work more effectively with dispersed and off-shore teams. Yet another BA may elect to improve their familiarity with compliance requirements because they are beginning work in the finance and insurance industries.

A BA’s non-functional requirements might be attributes such as:

Scalability – will the training enable the BA to take on larger, more complex projects?
Adaptability – will the training prepare them to adapt to changing environments?
Performance – will the training help them accomplish tasks more quickly, without losing accuracy?
Portability – will the training help the BA work in differing project environments?

Once you’ve defined your requirements, then you can evaluate what training is best for you.

(And if you think one of our IIBA-certified courses might fit your requirements, we’d love to hear from you – please email info@argondigital.com and let us know your training requirements.)