Business Analytics Prerequisites

Business analytics is the set of practices, technologies, and skills that allow for the ongoing iterative investigation of prior business performance. This knowledge can then be applied to business planning. You might worry that business analytics will take a lot of work to learn. This guide will help you understand the best methods for learning business analytics and what you should study first to make the learning process easier. This way, you’ll be successful however you choose to apply your new skills. 

What is Business Analytics?

Business Analytics is a group of technologies and disciplines, such as quantitative methods, statistical models, and data analysis, which are used to solve business problems. It relies on iteratively and methodologically exploring an organization’s data using statistical analysis techniques to make better, data-driven decisions. This involves a practical application of statistical analysis geared toward uncovering actionable recommendations.

Many companies view their data as a business asset and continue to explore ways to use it for a competitive advantage. To be successful with business analytics, an organization must have good quality data, as well as Business Analysts who not only understands the business but also the technologies needed to transform its data into insights. Business Analysts seek to draw concrete conclusions about a company by finding answers to questions such as why certain events happened, what is expected to occur in the future, and what actions can be done in the present.

Most business analytics tasks are descriptive, predictive, or prescriptive. Descriptive analytics involves analyzing historical data to discover how an organization could respond to specific variables. Predictive analytics examines historical data to predict the likelihood of specific future outcomes. Prescriptive analytics is a combination of descriptive and predictive analyses; it involves formulating a process with which users can anticipate what is expected to happen, when it will occur, and why it will transpire. Business Analysts rely on tools and skills such as data mining, association and sequence identification, text mining, data aggregation, forecasting, optimization, and data visualization to gather and present these data-driven insights.

Read more about what business analytics is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Business Analytics?

Business analytics is one of the most versatile skill sets you can bring to the professional arena. All businesses, from small startups to multinational companies, seek those with a background in business analytics who can work with data to solve complicated problems, devise useful business strategies, and clearly communicate with stakeholders. Most Business Analysts have a background working with technology and programming languages like C++ and Java, as well as various databases and testing methods. These individuals typically possess technical and business skills, making them high-demand among recruiters and employers. 

Business Analysts are typically good problem solvers. They can analyze problems and apply critical thinking to propose innovative solutions that consider variables such as market trends. These individuals also tend to have an analytical mindset, which allows them to apply statistical models to analyze large datasets. Their analytic skills help Business Analysts perform tasks like understanding consumer buying decisions and behaviors and using this information to formulate a marketing strategy.

Business Analysts are usually expert communicators. They can clearly communicate their data findings and present these insights to different teams on both the business and technical sides. This often requires adapting their communication style to best reach different audiences. These individuals also possess time-management skills to balance multiple project deadlines and perform under pressure.

Is Business Analytics Easy to Learn?

If you’re interested in learning business analytics, you may wonder if it’s an easy practice to learn. The good news is that you don’t have to be a computer whiz or math expert to be a good Business Analyst. Unlike fields such as data science, which require more advanced technical aptitude, business analytics is more focused on collecting real-world insights from large datasets.

One of the most crucial components of being a successful Business Analyst is communicating the business impacts of the data to various stakeholders. This can require translating complex information into accessible and understandable takeaways. For this reason, Business Analysts must be good at presenting and persuading. Those who wish to become Business Analysts often require a combination of technical training with soft skills, such as communication, which provides a way to collect important data findings and share them with others.

Instead of trying to learn business analytics on your own, Noble Desktop’s Business Analyst Certificate provides hands-on training with PowerPoint, Tableau, SQL, and Excel.

What to Know Before Learning Business Analytics

If you want to get started learning business analytics, there are several key skills you might consider studying first. Knowledge of the four types of data analytics, as well as a familiarity with Microsoft Excel and programming languages, are just some of the skills that can help you work with business data. The following is a breakdown of each of these skills and how they are useful for Business Analysts:

Knowledge of the Four Types of Analytics

Those who analyze business data must have a sound understanding of the four kinds of analytics, which they will use regularly:

• Descriptive analytics asks the question: What is currently happening at my business? It involves mining and aggregating data in a real-time dashboard. These in-the-moment analytics can help uncover current behavior patterns that may contribute to future outcomes.
• Diagnostic analytics asks: Why is it happening? This form of analytics studies how campaigns and processes performed in the past to gain insights into what exactly occurred and why it did. By isolating confounding information, it’s possible to spot cause-and-effect relationships that may emerge.
• Predictive analytics poses the question: What might happen in the future? This analytics form relies on forecasting techniques and statistical models that can be used to make informed predictions about the possibility of certain scenarios occurring.
• Prescriptive analytics asks: What is necessary to succeed? It is concerned with the actions that need to be taken to reach a desired outcome. Prescriptive analytics is especially useful for providing focused answers to specific questions. 

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is the industry-standard spreadsheet application used by individuals across professions for data management. This tool provides various capabilities for computations and calculations, as well as graphing tools and the VBA programming language. Most Business Analysts regularly work with Excel, which makes it an important prerequisite.

Noble Desktop’s in-person and live online Excel Bootcamp is a great way to learn how to work with macros, PivotTables, formulas, and functions.

Programming Languages

Business Analysts work with several programming languages for analytics tasks. The two most common languages are Python, which is used for general programming tasks, and R, which is used for statistical analysis. Although these languages aren’t vital for all business analytics tasks, they can be helpful for analyzing large datasets.

Noble Desktop offers training in both languages. Its Data Analytics with R Bootcamp is an immersive, five-day course that provides hands-on training with R. In addition, Noble’s Python for Data Science Bootcamp teaches students how to use statistics to create machine learning models.

Key Insights

• Learning business analytics requires a combination of hard and soft skills, such as technical training and clear communication skills.
• Before you learn business analytics, you may want to study R and Python programming languages, as well as Microsoft Excel.
• Business Analysts also have knowledge about the four kinds of analytics: predictive, prescriptive, diagnostic, and descriptive.
• If you want to learn more about business analytics, Noble Desktop’s in-person and live online courses provide hands-on training from industry experts.

Learn Business Analytics with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

If you want to study business analytics, Noble Desktop offers several excellent classes to prepare you to work as a Business Analyst. Noble’s Business Analyst Certificate is available in both the in-person and live online format. Participants in this hands-on course learn how to work with tools such as Tableau, SQL, PowerPoint, and Excel to analyze and visualize data. All participants receive live, project-based instruction from industry experts and can retake the course for up to one year to revisit the material.

For those who want to learn more about working with big data, Noble also has an in-person and live online Data Analytics Certificate. All participants receive one-on-one mentoring with tuition. This course is available in the full-time format that spans six weeks, as well as the part-time format of 24 weeks of evening classes. This project-based course covers core data analytics concepts and skills like collecting, wrangling, analyzing, and visualizing data. In addition, participants prepare for a career in business analytics or data analytics by reviewing case studies that incorporate both predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Those interested in comparing learning options can also browse Noble’s in-person and live online data analytics and data science classes to find the perfect class.