How Are Higher Education Members Reshaping Business Analysis? Part One

To foster future-ready business analysis professionals, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, a renowned liberal arts institution, primes early-career business analysts to approach business problems in an entirely new way. “The next generation of business analysis professionals must have an array of diverse skills to meet technological advances while having a mindset of lifelong learning to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive workforce,” says Thalia Giraldo, Assistant Director of Applied Learning Initiative and Innovation Projects at Trinity College. “Rapid technological changes and demands for innovation mean that business analysts must pair their fluency in digital skills with a creative and critical, human-centric approach”.

At Indiana Tech they have structured their program to run courses like enterprise labs which allows students to immediately put into practice tools, skills, and models they are learning right away. “We like to see students actually making decisions and learning from the consequences of their decisions, both good and bad, as opposed to focusing too heavily on possibilities and probabilities in closed systems. It's through constant solution-oriented iterations of course material (how would we use this tool, how does this context change our strategy, would this model work here, etc.) students learn and start to make the material their own - developing heuristic and technical level expertise,” says Trent Grable, Assistant Professor of Business, Director of the Center for Creative Collaboration at Indiana Tech. “We teach students to ask the right questions, and then ask more of them, to build the usefulness of their conclusions, decisions, and prescriptions,” states Grable.

At Cork University Business School of University College Cork in Ireland their BSc Business Information Systems Degree (http://www.ck203.ie) was already very much aligned with IIBA standards. The accreditation process for certification provided the opportunity to reflect on module content to ensure it met the needs of both graduates and industry. Since joining IIBA as an Academic partner in 2014, CUBS have updated its analysis modules and adopted the BABOK® Guide as the supporting text for their final year students. “We have used the IIBA model as a tool in teaching the skill of constant experimentation - continuous analysis of the conditions in which we are attempting to make good decisions. We want our students to be technically and quantitatively correct absolutely. However, we want them to realize even imperfect decisions made in unideal situations can be useful to your enterprise. It is their job as analysts to make the best sense of any available data to inform difficult decisions in any given context,” says Gaye Kiely, Lecturer, Cork University Business School, University College Cork.