Top 5 skills to put on your business analyst resume in 2020
Business analysts need to be armed with stellar skills that help foster companies and achieve business goals.
Hence, recruiters look for professionals who can deliver on such promises, and the only way you can convey your expertise is through a resume.
So when you craft your resume with an ill-prepared mindset with no clue about what skills are appropriate for showcasing your expertise. It becomes a critical problem.
Recruiters need to see your skills in the resume to assess your profile and crown you as a potential candidate.
To help you with that, we devised the following guide for the top 5 skills to put in your resume:
Business analytics skills
These skills are an integral part of your job that you use on a day-to-day basis.
Hence, to be considered as a serious candidate, you need to showcase these skills in your business analyst resume.
However, you cannot stuff your resume with industry-related jargon. You need to acknowledge the fact that the recruiter may not possess that knowledge.
So it is important to make your resume common. Below are a few skills that are highly critical for a business analyst:
- Market Search
- Brand Management
- Sales Enhancement
- Budget Planning
- Business Forecasting
- Report Generation
Core technical skills
Being a business analyst, there are multiple tools and methodologies you use every day.
Including such technical skills in your resume is very important, and is different from your generalized business analyst skills.
Your technical skills may range from any software you use to tools and methodologies.
These skills work as a way of showcasing your abilities concerning the technical part of the job.
Here are a few methodologies that a business analyst uses:
- Use-case
- Software Development Life Cycle
- Data Mapping
- Data Migration
- Wireframe
- Python
- MySQL
Transferable skills
Transferable skills are a universal set of skills that most individuals include in a resume. For example, leadership, interpersonal, communication, etc.
Apart from taking care of analyzing the data trend, business analysts are required to communicate with the stakeholders and use interpersonal skills in the day to day operations.
Hence, your resume should be a mix of your core competencies and soft skills.
However, it is important to note that including soft skills is not ideal in a resume.
Check the example below:
Communication can be converted to “Client Communication/Communication”
Analytical skills can be written as “Research Analysis”
Use the above approach to include soft skills in your resume. It helps your resume look professional and definitely sets it apart from the rest.
Skills extracted from the job description
These skills are perhaps the most important ones to write in your resume.
Recruiters do spend a significant amount of time designing the job description to address the requirements of the profile. Hence, it is important to highlight the skills listed in the job description.
Let’s say the job description requires the candidate to “outline problems and requirements”.
Though this definitely would have been a part of your professional experience, you must have thought of this as irrelevant to include in your resume. But you need to include these skills in your resume.
You can write it as “issue resolution” and “requirement assessment”.
Further, the idea is to create a job-specific resume that helps you pass the ATS (applicant tracking system), a software designed to screen resumes based on a few set of keywords.
So, your resume must have these keywords extracted from the job description.
Certifications skills
Certifications help you prove your merit to the recruiter and give you a scope to upskill.
Whether you are looking to advance your career or targeting an entry-level position as a business analyst. Certification is a great tool to bridge that skills gap.
However, when you list your certifications, to showcase the skills you need to include the key modules as well.
For example:
Business Analytics Certification | Business Analytics Today | Boston, Massachusetts | May ‘19 – Jun ‘20
Software Development Life Cycle | Logistic Regression | Predictive Analytics | Data Visualization
See how the certifications showcase your newly gained expertise. Making such modifications improves the significance of your resume.
Conclusion
To conclude, skills are very important to convey your expertise to the recruiter. Hence, you should take note of everything you include in your resume. Including skills that you cannot substantiate, is not ideal.
Further, creating buckets for points in the professional experience section is a great way to extract skills. Let’s say you created a bucket for 3-4 points as “goal programming & data imputation”. You can include this expertise in a designated skills section.
