Hi everyone,
This is Amy from Earth planet. I used to work as a Business Analyst (BA) for a couple of years and for the rest of my life I would never forget that miserable duration of time. And why do I use the word “miserable”? Because my starting point for this job is way more backward than others in the IT industry: Technical knowledge is at a zero scale. So I wrote this post to help people who have the same background as me or people who intend to pursue BA job, to decide your career path in the future. 

Lesson 1: Are you ready to learn a language which is not from Earth? 

I’m sure that you’ve already learnt at least one foreign language before at school. How was that? I believe that most people would say it’s not easy at all (and it’s a nightmare for me, FYI). We have the Latin system and logographic system language, but the one that I’ve been working on should be called Alien language. 

This is the first price that you need to pay when you start working as a BA without technical support and business domain knowledge. You will see that you’re the only one in the team who doesn’t know what the hell everyone is talking about. Even if you understand each and every single word that they’re saying, but your brain cannot work properly to decode any combination of those. So what should you do in that case? When your boss just assigned to you a project on the second day at work? Well, my angel on the left shoulder screamed “Run for your life! You idiot!” but my demon on the right shoulder said, “Let’s kill the Alien and take its brain”. In the end, the demon won and I started a horrible year of working and learning at the same time.  

God blessed me since I got through several of small-sized projects and still survived after a year. It’s kind of interesting when you look back to your very first user stories and use cases when you already have 1 year of experience. Because this is the moment you see how clumsy you were when handling a user story, but you also realize how much you have earned from your job. 

Lesson learnt: Don’t be afraid of anything, even it’s something that you haven’t seen before. As long as you’re a BA, you’ll have to switch project/domain many times depending on the needs of clients. 

Lesson 2: Wake up! You are not the center of the world! 

The ugly truth is that nobody will actually consider your pieces of advice if you’re the newbie in a project, even if you graduated with a high grade from the university. In my case, they were listening to my comments very carefully, and then quickly turned them to invalid ideas due to dozens of facts. Your team would appreciate very much if you’re able to provide something from your previous experience which can handle the problem they’re dealing with. So please don’t lose your confidence in such cases because it didn’t show that you’re wrong. It just proves that you still need to catch-up a lot of things and you must get to the point where you can make impacts to other members in the project.     

Lesson learnt: You cannot go directly from A to Z in a day. Adaptation is a must-have step to take.  

(To be continued) 

See you guys in Part 2! Bye Bye! 

Amy Do