🛀🏽 🌏 🗿 Analyst Development 👇🏽 🤚🏽 🕜

As a rule, everyone is interested in growing, developing their professional qualities. Analysts are no exception. In this article I described ways to gain new knowledge in the field of analysis.

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In general, the development of any employee can be described by the Motivation-Competence (or enthusiasm-competency) matrix: four main groups are identified depending on the level of motivation and the level of knowledge.

Novice enthusiasts
Disappointed students
Cautious Performers
Confident Professionals

One and the same person, to become a professional in a certain field, goes through all these stages of development:

at first the project or field of knowledge is new for him, but on the other hand, expectations energize,
at the first difficulties and failures, the realization comes that skills are not enough, long and painstaking work remains, motivation falls,
over time, the body of knowledge grows, experience comes, in standard situations a specialist copes well, but more “victories”, successful projects are required to begin to feel confident,
after that, the specialist becomes a professional in his field, can solve complex problems, control their implementation.

After some time, the professional must find a new area, a new project, and the four stages will be repeated again. The thing is that motivation will begin to fall, and in this case it will lead either to a decrease in labor efficiency (due to boredom and depression) or to dismissal (the search for “new sensations”).

In order to successfully go through all the stages, to become professionals in their field, it is necessary to constantly develop, and for this, Analysts have several ways.

Mentoring

I think this is the most understandable and well-known way of employee development. Improves the quality of work, reduces the time for adaptation of new employees, increases comfort, not too expensive.

A beginner needs a mentor to increase his level of competence, an experienced employee needs a “padawan” to increase his own motivation, it also helps to understand, “sort through” the accumulated knowledge.

The duties of a mentor often include:

Employee Adaptation
Training
Motivation (Cheering)
Advice
Direction of Growth
Concretization of tasks
Feedback (very important!)

Courses

It is also quite traditional to develop certain skills through training courses. They can be full-time (both within the company, and with a visit to the training site), and in absentia (in the format of webinars).

Recently, courses on online platforms have been popular, where there is a theoretical part, the ability to ask lecturers questions, as well as a practical part where they remotely give feedback on completed tasks.

There are free courses, but they are usually limited to the theoretical part, and also have some purpose: running the course, advertising the company and finding potential employees (“head hunting”), advertising any practical platforms and tools.

The price range of paid courses is quite large, because some of them allow you to get a new profession (for example, a data analyst or a UX designer) and can be lengthy (several months).

Also, courses can be developed personally for the needs of your company, your team. Such courses are usually the most useful, but also more expensive (the price depends on the number of hours, the number of copyrighted materials and the level of experts).

Conferences

Participation in conferences, meetings and other meetings allows not only to learn something new, but to a greater extent increase the enthusiasm of the employee.

Most popular among analysts recently:

Assemblage point
ITsubbotnik
Analyst days
Secr
Datastart

Regular conferences that take place once or several times a year are listed. Price range: from 5 to 60 thousand per participant, depending on the conference and degree of participation. There are options to get a discount or a free ticket for volunteering, through the drawing of tickets, for a report or a master class. Also, many companies hold thematic meetings (like-minded meetings to discuss certain issues in an informal setting), as a rule, even free of charge, but with pre-registration. Announcements of such events can be found in the analytic communities (a little more about them).

A special place among the conferences is held by the Summer Analytical Festival (LAF, lafest.ru) Traditionally, it is held outdoors, for two days, experts in system analysis, business analysis, working with requirements and product management share their knowledge, best practices and experience. The first day is held in the format of a classic conference, the second - free-form communication: round tables in the fresh air, discussions, entertainment, cultural relaxation.

Communities

Communities are, in essence, a set of analysts who are ready to communicate, share experience. From different cities and countries, different specializations, such an audience helps to find the answer to that question that could not be solved with the help of literature.

The most popular chat rooms are Telegram chats. In my opinion, this is the development (replacement) of the forums that were used earlier, a new way of interaction between professionals who are not united by one employer at a distance. In addition to chats, many enthusiastic teams broadcast channels on the same platform where news from the world of analytics, materials and articles, announcements about meetings and conferences are published. The following are some useful links on the topic of business analysis.

Business Analysis Magazine_chat (https://t.me/joinchat/BNrvuEIQ2-sWpo7BcKl9OA). , , : « , - . , , .. , , , . , ».
- (https://t.me/bamrus). , : « bamrus, rss (https://vk.com/1tworks), . , , , , . IT-, , . , , , ».
SPb CoA (https://t.me/spbcoa) — -, (https://t.me/moscoa) – . - – , , -, , -, . , - (http://tochkasborki.spbcoa.ru).
BA/SA (https://telegram.me/spbcoachanel) – SPb CoA -. , , -.
(https://t.me/analyst_job) – , ( ). , .

- (T-shifting)

This term refers to the study (and performance) by an employee of the responsibilities of other team members. If we are talking about analytics in the software development team, then T-shifting means that the analyst can try his hand, as a rule, in programming and testing. This does not necessarily mean the development of a new profession (I believe that the choice of a specialty depends on the psychological profile of a person, and for someone the work as a programmer is more suitable, and for someone an analyst, this, of course, is not a ban, but the effectiveness will be different). Rather, it is a way to deepen your knowledge in related fields, to better understand the work of the entire team, to better understand the specifics.

So, a system analyst who is familiar with programming, or better even with product code, can choose the best option for solving a particular problem (reducing the labor costs of programmers, while not losing value to the user). When familiar with the work of testers - it better describes acceptance criteria in the requirements.

The most important thing in T-shifting is not to turn the analyst (and not turn) into a "multi-armed god", not to try to save on all other roles in the team! For example, the fact that an analyst can work as a quality engineer does not mean that he must do the work for him, so a fresh and independent view of the opportunities realized will be lost. And the excessive deepening of the analyst in the code will lead to a loss of focus on users.

Use with caution! If you overdo it with T-shifting, then instead of the novelty and development of the employee, you can get a deterioration in the quality of work and burnout.

Analytic games

Finally, I want to talk about the project "Analytical Games" (https://t.me/analystgames). At its core, this is a cooperative business game to collect requirements and create an image of a digital product, held several times a year in different cities of Russia and the CIS.

The game is dedicated to solving a case on an unusual topic, selected in accordance with modern trends in the field of creating digital solutions for individuals, business, and the state. The mechanics of the game involves an initial discussion and subsequent work in teams with cross-reviewing and evaluating intermediate and final results. The estimated duration of the game is from 8 to 9 hours, including lunch break.

During the game, participants need to demonstrate the skills of conceptual and creative thinking, networking, negotiating and resolving conflicts, visualizing business analysis information, goal-setting, stakeholder analysis, risks, financial modeling, etc.

In my opinion, this perfectly helps to work out the situations that arise in the work of the analyst almost daily, learn how to effectively interact, and simply recharge with positive energy.

Anna Mikhailova
Head of Data Mining, Chief System Analyst,
Codex Consortium