A great way to get some practical business analysis experience is to undertake small personal BA projects where you can practice your skills and sharpen your instincts.
Of course, the one you choose to work and practice on should be close to your interests and align with what you want to do in your career. If you’re unsure of what type of activity to undertake, there are plenty of online resources that can give you some specific ideas for beginner-friendly projects.
Some of these also provide all the necessary information and guidance for the successful completion of various interesting and challenging projects such as analysing customer feedback, predicting customer churn rates, estimating retail prices, analysing employee exit surveys, and many others.
While working on your project, you’ll get a chance to go through most of the processes experienced analysts go through while performing their jobs.
A personal project will start with setting goals and defining clear objectives and end with evaluating how good you did.
In between, depending on the type of project you choose, you’ll likely have an opportunity to cover plenty of real BA responsibilities, such as creating mock requirements, analysing business processes, developing process models, creating reporters and visualisations, and documenting your work and progress.
The last part is especially important as documenting these projects will help you build up your portfolio that you can present to potential employers. Also, you can publish and share documented projects on platforms such as GitHub to demonstrate your hands-on BA skills.
If you have classmates, coworkers, or friends who are also aspiring business analysts, you can collaborate and work on group projects.
Similar to personal projects, this will provide you with a useful hands-on project experience, but also help all of the participants learn how to work as a team and understand the team dynamics in business analysis, When working on a group project, it’s usually a good idea to rotate roles and tasks, so everyone can experience working on and managing different aspects of the project.
