3 Types of Business Analysts

What kind of business analyst you want to be is one of the most crucial considerations you must make while beginning your BA career. This is a crucial choice that could affect the rest of your career.

What Are The 3 Types of Business Analysts?

The three Business Analyst archetypes are:

1. Business Process Analyst (BPA): focuses on the business side of things rather than on the I.T. side.

2. Business Systems Analyst (BSA): focuses on the system side of things, typically on the polar opposite side of a BPA.

3. Generalist Business Analyst (GBA): started off as a BPA or BSA and have grown they’re skill set into the area they didn’t start off in.

What Type of BA Are You?

Let’s talk about the most important thing that you have to consider when you’re trying to make a decision. What is the right fit for you? My advice to you is to choose your BA Type based on wherever your existing strengths are.

Type 1: Business Process Analyst

Chances are you’re going to be a much better fit for the business process analyst role when you’re starting out if:

• you like bringing people along with you to certain conclusions about how things should work
• you like to work a lot more with people than with software
• you like to negotiate

If your natural instinct and your natural aptitude is to work a lot more with people than with software then you want to go for the BPA role.

Type 2: Business Systems Analyst

The flip side of the BPA role obviously is that if you like tinkering around with data. If you’re the type of person who:

• Enjoys trying to figure out how the software works or how devices work in general, or,
• If you’re an engineer then you want to aim for the business systems analyst type of role.

A lot of developers who are interested in moving into an analysis role typically go for the systems analyst role because they can carry over a lot of the skills that they have as a developer as you are being probably the primary one.

Type 3: Generalist Business Analyst

The Generalist BA is what I like to call a well-rounded business analyst.  

Casandra started off as a QA Analyst. Casandra transitioned into a BSA role performing technical systems analysis. Casandra was put on a project where she learned how to work a lot more with the business. She then learned how to do a lot of process design work and a lot of the softer skills like objection handling and a lot of the other skills that you need to be a good process analyst. Overtime Casandra has grown into a well-rounded business analyst.

Career Strategy Perspective

Understand from a career strategy perspective if you want to become an analyst. The type of business analyst you choose to really set the stage for your BA Career. There are many paths for getting into the business analysis profession.

Chances are you’ve already started thinking about the future of your career if you’re a new graduate or have been a BA for a couple of years.

How Much Does Each BA Type Earn?

The business systems analyst typically earns more than the business process analysts and there are a few different reasons for why that is.

The main reason being systems analysis work tends to be a lot more grueling and a lot more difficult to learn than process analysis work. The amount of pressure that a systems analyst typically has to deal with in most companies is a lot higher than the pressure that a business process analyst has to deal with.

That’s not to say that the Business Process Analyst job is easy because trying to help the company figure out how they’re going to function is not by any means an easy task but technically speaking the systems analysis skills are in a lot more demand and they’re harder to acquire.

So in terms of compensation, it’s a systems analyst that wins out on the compensation side of things.

Job Difficulty Level for Each BA Type

Let’s talk job difficulty level.

The BSA role is typically more difficult and that’s why the compensation for BSA roles tends to be a little bit higher. Technically speaking, as a business systems analyst you’re going to have to learn some harder technical skills.

These are skills like SQL for example. SQL is probably the key skill that systems analysts have to know. SQL lets systems analysts tinker around inside a database without having to work with the application itself. So you can basically open up the hood of a piece of software and troubleshoot issues or solve problems using SQL.

In terms of difficulty levels, the BSA role is typically a lot more difficult. Obviously, that’s part of the reason why the compensation for it is a little bit higher.  

What kind of skills do you need?

A lot of new analysts have a very difficult time trying to figure out where they should be investing their time and effort. When it comes to skills-building choosing the right type of analyst is going to help you narrow down the set of options about what kind of courses you want to take.

If you have better and clearer direction you can start to hone in on very specifically on what it is that you need and you can start to achieve your career goals a lot more quickly and a lot less expensively than you would if you didn’t have any career direction.