Disparity among Business Analyst & Data Analyst

Lately we might have read, heard, seen people talking about business analyst (BA) and data analyst (DA). By the name we might have thought business analyst is someone who deals with “business” and data analyst is someone who deals with “data”. To get a clear understanding lets first know the difference between the two. The definition of Business analyst by IIBA is “The Business Analyst is an agent of change. Business Analyst is a disciplined approach for introducing and managing change to organizations, whether they are for-profit businesses, governments, or non-profits.” whereas data analyst is “The Data Analyst is the professional whose focus of analysis and problem solving relates to data, types of data, and relationships among data elements within a business system or IT system…”

Responsibilities:

Now that we know the basic difference between business analyst and data analyst, lets dive in to know the responsibilities, skills and more on the topic. Firstly, we shall discuss the responsibilities as BA, BA work with clients to understand the problem or requirement, assess functional and non-functional requirements, communicate the problem/requirement to team, does user acceptance testing, present and document and deliver the results to the client. They basically mediate between IT team and stakeholders. Whereas data analyst works with programming team to collect and analyze data, use pre-existing data to solve the problems, present analytical findings to team.  With this we can conclude that BA deals with non-technical part of IT problem/solution and DA deals with technical part of IT problem/solution.

Skills:

Coming to who can become a business analyst (BA) and data analyst (DA). Certain skills are required to become BA and DA.  To become a BA one must have good communication skills, presentation skills, people handling skills and knowledge of tools like balsamic, Axure, MS Visio. To become a DA one must possess knowledge of SQL, Programming knowledge (most preferable python), knowledge of tools like Tableau, Excel etc…

Companies hiring:

There are many companies looking out for BA like Amazon, Accenture, cognizant, IBM and many more. DA are hired by companies like Facebook, amazon, apple, tesla, twitter and more. Now that we know the difference it is up to the individual to decide whether they want to be a business analyst (BA) or data analyst (DA) based on the qualification, skills they possess, where their interest lies, what they want to be in their career.

After reading this post hopefully now you have all doubts cleared and you know exactly who a business analyst is and who a data analyst is. No matter which you choose both the profiles are demanding and trending. So why wait? hurry up!!! Choose who you want to be and start your journey now!!