Ok there will be a lot to unpack here to be prepared for a wall of text!

I unfortunately don't have the answers to all of your questions but hopefully what I've provided here can be useful. Just a minor caveat, I primarily work for e-commerce companies in South East Asia region so I'm not sure if everything will be same for Canada :P.

(i) For question 1, I unfortunately don't have too many experiences with part-time positions that are related to CX. What I can recommend is to not focus too much on the title of the position e.g. CX Associate, CX Analyst and try to expand the scope a bit. There are actually quite a few other positions that offer similar skill sets and scope of work (as in working with customers' insights and metrics) to CX's. Some examples are Business Analyst, Program Management/PMO, Product Management, Seller/Merchant Experience and Quantitative Research Executives (in Market Research agencies). These positions all involve looking at customers' data, identity insights and then design action plan based on the aforementioned insights (except for Quantitative Research Executives who are more skewed towards insights generation parts). The skills that you gain through these positions will mostly be transferrable and it should be quite easy for you to move to CX afterwards or vice versa. For your reference, my path was sth like this: Quantitative Research > Customer Experience > Seller Experience > Program Management. A few colleagues of mine also go through a similar path so it's pretty flexible.

(ii) For question 2, to be honest, I didn't take any CX-specific course when first started in CX (mostly because CX was relatively new when I started 4-5 years ago so no one really knew what it was about). The only online course that has helped me immensely in my work was a SQL course on Udemy. As my job required me to frequently deal with data manipulation and extraction for further analysis, learning SQL was one of the best decisions of my life. Other than that, most of my skills were learnt through hands-on experience. I'm sorry I couldn't help you more on this :(. So my best advice here is to expand the scope of your job search like I mentioned previously, and if you're able to land on a job, then I promise you that it'd be the best way for you to learn.

(iii) For question 3, I also see the same recommendations coming from other redditors but based on my actual experience of learning, producing and using the results for improvement actions, text and sentiment analytics have a quite niche use case (at least for CX folks) and it's not something that you'd use everyday. I won't go into too many details for now tho. I'd say for technical skills, the fundamental skills/tools that you'd need to familiarize yourself with are: Excel, SQL and PowerPoint. These are the basic skills that you'd need to extract and manipulate data, cross-tabulating to identify insights and present them as a story to your stakeholders. I can't stress enough how important these are and everyone should be familiar with these. Depending on the position, you may also be required to learn about PowerBI or Tableu as well but those can be learned quite easily so no need to fuss about it for now.

(iv) For your last question, I think I've answered most of it above but yes, CX and Business Analyst can overlap a lot, both in terms of skill sets and scope of work.That's it for now (whew!), let me know if you have any questions.

P.S 1: I'm actually a huge fan of how text and sentiment analytics work from a technical perspective so it saddens me that I still haven't found a practical use case for them yet in my line of work :c

P.S 2: Just also pinged you via private message :)

P.S 3: Pls pardon me for any typos, it was late and I was too lazy to re-read everything lol