Becoming Who You Want To Be

If you are looking for a growth area in the job market, look no further than the field of Business Intelligence. As many other areas in the economy are either on a hiring freeze or laying off, many companies are ramping up their business intelligence programs. This means more jobs and opportunities if you can do this type of work. Companies realize that in order to survive and be successful, long-term, they must invest in programs that help them be a better business – Business Intelligence is a program that can do that.

Because of the popularity of Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence jobs are on the rise. This provides a great opportunity to the many people that qualify for these types of positions. You are in demand right now, and should have your pick as to where you want to work. You may be thinking to yourself, I dont have any experience with business intelligence. That is okay, everyone had to start somewhere. The truth of the matter is, not a lot of people have experience with business intelligence.

Even if you havent done business intelligence work before, you may have worked in related fields that can immediately transfer over. Have you ever worked as a data or business analyst? How about a financial analyst? These are very common titles used in organizations, and if you have done the work associated with these titles, you are likely well on your way to working in business intelligence.

Because business intelligence is such a hot field, software vendors have jumped on the bandwagon and are creating very powerful tools for analyzing the data. The tools have the ability, after you have pointed them in the right direction, to review the data and establish relationships, make intelligent predictions, and help guide future decisions of the organization. Because of the heavy reliance on tools in business intelligence, you should be very willing to become an expert user of these tools, and demonstrate your willingness to the hiring managers.

Business intelligence tools are very advanced. They can connect to many different types of data storage systems; from excel, to db2, sql server, access, and txt – it can analyze these data sources for valuable bits of information that a human would never be able to identify. Using sophisticated algorithms that are built into the tools, they can then provide lots of helpful information. It then becomes the analysts job to wade through this information and measure its worth. Once that it complete, it should be formatted and presented to those that would benefit most from learning the new knowledge gained.

Presenting is a critical piece to business intelligence. When trying to land a BI job, stress your ability to interface with executives and work across the many different areas of business within the company. Business Intelligence has many touch-points across a companys lines of business, and it is important that the interviewer be comfortable with the thought of you talking with sales, marketing, IT, and the executives.

Like most jobs, you will need many diverse skills in order to be successful in a business intelligence role. You don’t necessarily have to have specific business intelligence experience; it is very likely you can apply some of your past work and skills to the job requirements of a business intelligence analyst. Study the job description so that you can identify these matches, and then during your interview be prepared to make it clear to the interviewer that although you don’t have direct BI experience, you do have related experience that would make you a perfect fit.