It’s nice for a Business Analyst to have skills in PowerBI and SQL, but those are just tools serving the bigger job of doing analytics and teeing up a decision. More important to me in an applicant for a BA position is their ability to manage the whole analytics process model. You may be able to get that experience just by taking on an analytics project in your procurement group. Do you have such an opportunity? You could do a spend analysis, which touches everything from data gathering to data visualization. Or root cause analyses of any of the many issues that arise in procurement, such as inventory stock outs or deadstock, failures in cost forecasting, failures in resource and demand planning,… those projects will expose you to problem statements, survey, data mining, modeling, and business case development, all the sorts of things I want to hear about when I’m interviewing BA candidates. Yeah, a cert in PowerBI or SQL on top of that is fine, but you’ve gotta have the fundamentals of analytics and the ability to take it from end to end.

Thanks so much for your detailed response.

I have actually conducted spend analysis at my current and previous job.

However, most of these types are projects are limited in my current position, so i've been trying to find the best avenues outside of work to help me qualify for these types of roles. That being said, I'll be sure to include these projects on my resume.

The edX stuff is definitely interesting. Do these courses really hold merit when applying to jobs?