How hireable am I as an IT Business Analyst right now?

March 30, 2023 10:12 AM

Help. I am in a very bad work situation and I probably need to quit. Can you please look at my qualifications/experience and let me know if you think I'm well-positioned for a new Business Analyst job?

At work, I am dealing with what all my of instincts are screaming is a narcissist, who is criticizing my work, not offering actionable solutions that would satisfy him, and taking over my work and re-writing it - all very publicly.

I've gone to my manager to resolve this, but it sounds like my manager and lot of upper management have 'drank the kool-aid', so to speak, and think that his frustration with the project itself is valid, and it's just his methods that need work. This bully, I'll call him A for asshat, is very senior and the company believes he is essential. I don't believe A is willing or capable of change. Next week, I have to sit down in a meeting with A and my supervisor to try to resolve our conflict.

I'm not sure I can stomach that meeting. This whole project is a sinking ship. And I need off that ship.


I was hired to this job as a dev. After about 14 months, I switched over to doing BA work, after having wanted to transition to doing BA work for years.

- BA in English
- Diploma in IT
- 9 years of development (full stack)
- 8 months working as a Business Analyst

The question here is: am I hireable as a BA right now? Or do I need more experience than the past 8 months? Is there a certification that could strengthen my resume?


Other notes: I'm in Canada, so labour laws here are going to be unique to my location. Also, yes I'm a woman in tech and this project is only maybe 10% female, but there is no indication anywhere in here that this is a gendered problem.

posted by kitcat to Work & Money (8 answers total)

Me:

-BA in History.
-No IT qualifications.
-No development experience, just a few years in tech support and B2B software configuration.
-No prior experience as a BA.

Also me:
-IT business analyst for a little under three years.
posted by kevinbelt at 10:27 AM on March 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

You are very hireable. Start looking for a new job right away, and think of yourself as someone with a decade of experience in IT who hasn't switched careers, just roles. Apply to every BA job you can find. If at all possible, don't quit your current job right away. Treat it as a professional learning experience, try not to take any of it personally, and keep getting paid until you find a better job.
posted by grog at 10:27 AM on March 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

I was a BA for a while, and I never had a senior manager meddle, but I had a lot of developers who wanted to rewrite everything, usually making things more confusing and making designs worse. In this case, you're spending your time looking for a new job, so half-ass it and let this person re-write everything.

In my case, we typically did several projects at the same time, most of which came out well, and which my bosses noticed, and those developers moved on or retired. So it wasn't like the whole job sucked, it was just all the work for a specific project that sucked.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:58 AM on March 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think lots of dev shops are really looking for BAs with strong dev backgrounds, so I think you're fine on those grounds. You need to plan your talking points about leaving after 8 months as a BA, but this can absolutely be diplomatic bullshit like "just not enough work/pipeline to support multiple BAs and I'm the newest so I'm afraid they will want me to go back to dev".

I will observe that it sounds like you're so beat down by the current environment that you're questioning your "right" to get out and find something better. This is absolutely okay to do. The market will let you know if they aren't interested, so just get yourself out there and see who responds.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:01 PM on March 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Starting my official tech BA job in a week, after a career mostly outside tech in NGO and editorial. BA work is very people and project skills, you’re well qualified. Apply and apply! I found it useful to do some online courses in specific project management stuff where I knew it but didn’t have the industry vocabulary for it so that I could confidently answer questions.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:00 PM on March 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, definitely qualified in my opinion. Whenever my department hires business analysts, the hiring managers always seem to get most excited about people who have the magic combination of dev experience + communication skills.
posted by Brioche at 1:49 AM on March 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

I concur you are qualified and agree that Business Analyst doesn't have a concrete fixed definition that everyone uses. You are advised to drill down into specifics to show off your actual capabilities and to attract BA work that interest you and plays well with your skills.

I don't hire people but I am very close to lots of people that do and if you can plausible say you have any sort of intro level data science skills you should at least mention them.
posted by mmascolino at 6:31 AM on March 31, 2023

Oh yeah, on the point of the title I'm not sure I've ever met two BAs with the same role, so you are certainly not committing any kind of fraud. I once TOOK a BA role and then when I started I was like "okay so what exactly is my job here?" and my boss was like "uhh, well, you know...analyzing, um, business and stuff" and yeah...that worked out as well as you might imagine. (I was not actually a developer before, and now that I have left that situation I actually am a semi-dev now. It's a pretty flexible industry, don't sweat this too bad.)
posted by Lyn Never at 8:25 AM on March 31, 2023