Are Business Analysis Skill Crucial for L&D Professionals?

Do you know that sharpening your skills in Business Analysis can help you significantly in performing your L&D role? 

Yes, you read that right! As a Learning and Development manager, you have to deal with many structured data. So knowing to manage and extract meaningful reports from the available data would be essential to execute your role exceptionally well.

As a Learning and Development manager you need to analyse Skill Gap, create reports and assess data for measuring training effectiveness and many more!

In this article, I will help you comprehend why you need to have Business analysis skills if you want to be an exceptional L&D professional. But before that, we will understand what business analysis is.

What is Business Analysis? 

Business Analysis

Business Analysis is the set of jobs, understanding, and procedures required to determine business requirements and decide solutions to business enterprise concerns. Further, business analysts estimate past and present company data to enhance decision-making procedures within organizations. Besides, the business analysis may also be performed to understand the current state or identify business needs. However, business analysis is conducted to define and validate solutions that meet industry requirements, plans, or goals in most circumstances.

Top Business analysis skills useful for Learning and Development Professionals

• Understanding the Organizational Business Objective

A business analyst always understands an organization’s goals and problems. Similarly, as an L&D manager, you must comprehend the organizational objectives to create more suitable training programs to meet those goals. 

Understanding the business motive is a superior and distinctive skill you both need to address. Moreover, business analysts recognize business problems and come up with the most suited solutions as you do for the learning requirements of the organization.

Thus, having the aptitude for identifying and understanding the organizational business objective is a must-have skill you can learn if you learn business analytics skills.

• Skills Gap Analysis 

Skills Gap Analysis–– A day today’s routine task when it comes to your role as an L&D manager. A skills gap analysis is an instrument utilized to evaluate the difference (or gap) between the existing state and a future objective state. For HR, the skills gap examination is a method to locate which skills and learning are lacking among the employees in the organization. A practical skills gap examination will also permit you to optimize your learning and development agendas to reskill individuals in your organization. 

However, to perform the skills gap analysis; you need to collect relevant data. Now the question arises of how the relevant data be collected? You can gather by utilizing paper-based examinations and supporting interviews or skill management software. Especially when conducting a skill gap analysis among many employees, the skill management software becomes the more apparent option. 

And finally, when you get the research done and gather all the structured data, you will need to take the appropriate decisions based on the data. Thus, sorting, arranging, and analyzing data becomes a significant factor when working as an L&D manager. 

Once you grasp the data analysis by learning business analysis skills, you will get a way to find out the Skills and knowledge lacking among the employees in your organization, making you the most reliable and efficient L&D manager.

• Analytical and Critical Thinking

If there was one life skill everyone on the planet needed, it was the ability to think with critical objective- said Henry David Thoreau.

So let us first understand what Criticism is? Criticism is the examination and test of propositions offered for acceptance to discover whether they coordinate with the truth. It is known to all that critical thinking and curiosity are creativity principles. And you being in the learning and development profession, have to be highly creative, for which you need the skills to think and analyze critically.

Although thinking may sound primary, it is a skill everyone cannot do. Analytical and critical thinking is one of the essence of business analyst skills. Once you learn business analysis, you will undoubtedly master the skill of critical thinking and analytical thinking. This skill is essential for you to perform your role in the L&D department. Moreover, a business analyst ought to examine and decode the client’s requirements distinctly, which you, as an L&D professional, also has a similar role you need to play in your everyday routine. Furthermore, critical thinking will help you make the best training delivery and give you the best in the industry training creation ideas.

Similarly, critical thinking helps a business analyst in assessing multiple options before arriving at the aspired solution, and so do you, as an L&D manager, need to do. Business analysts concentrate on collecting and comprehending the client’s requirements. Correspondingly, critical thinking helps prioritize business needs; thus, you will be able to perform your role exceptionally by mastering critical thinking.

When it comes to creating effective learning programs, an outstanding analytical bend of mind will help you reach the stated goals even when there is a restriction in the aids for creating and managing training solutions for the organizations.

• Risk mitigation techniques

They say, “Nothing is gained without taking risks,” which is true. Risk is part and parcel of every business. While leading the learning and development department, it is apparent that you must undertake training related risks. Whether it is the skills gap analysis or the effectiveness of the training, you are always at risk of its hit rate. So the risk is an inevitable part of your division. 

Indeed, recognizing risk is an initial critical stage. However, just recognizing will not help deal with risk. Coping with the risk is an essential step. Understanding and considering risk are not the same as doing something about risk.   

Business analysis teaches you four different strategies to mitigate risk: avoid, accept, reduce/control, or transfer, which you can apply in your training creation and training plans to prevent the risk of a training failure.

The risks can be mitigated if managed early. No doubt; business analysts often see any risks first, so learning the skills of risk identification and management by analyzing the data and applying critical thinking is essential.

You will need to apply the risk management skills to make your training deliveries error-free, leading to maximum production. You will be able to identify any risk and prevent its effect by recognizing these risks and determining how to manage the problems.

• Cost-Benefit Analysis

Another crucial skill that business analysis teaches is the skill of negotiation and cost-benefit analysis. Business analysts conduct a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the costs and effectiveness of the project. 

When organizations embark on new projects, business analysts utilize cost-benefit research to verify if they should venture into those certain undertakings. In the same manner, in your role as an L&D manager, you have to do a rigorous cost analysis to estimate the budget and cost of the training projects. Hence, learning these skills from the business analysis program will help you accomplish your task excellently. 

Further, while working as an L&D manager, you will be continuously allotted a respective budget to perform your jobs of training deliveries. However, to fulfil the training delivery needs, you must possess negotiation skills as you may occasionally require more additional budget to complete some tasks. 

Definitely, negotiation is a crucial skill learnt in business analysis. Business analysts negotiate at every project phase. Similarly, you have to do as a training and development manager. Sharpening the skills of cost estimation and negotiation can be helpful for both the organization as well as your individual growth in your L&D career journey, making you an outstanding L&D manager.

• Decision-Making Skills

Another non-technical skill that a business analysis program familiarises one with is decision-making skills. Indeed, the decisions made by a business analyst has direct and indirect consequence on the company’s business. Hence, business analysts are deemed to drive decisions taken by critically examining and considering the accurate data available.

Before making a decision, a business analyst decodes the situation and finds alternative business plans. They then test all the alternative techniques and judge based on their opinions concerning these procedures. They eventually try and enforce the solution. This practice is the best practice to be taken from the Business analysts, so when you work within the L&D department, you should be able to heed this practice of effective and calculative decision-making. 

• Microsoft Excel – Skills 

This is a fundamental skill that every business analyst has, and also, people in any domain or managerial role need to master this skill. Thus you being an L&D manager, need to master this age-old tool which can do magic to any set of organized data. Further, business analysts use Excel to perform several computations, data, and funding examinations to solve business conventions. 

In the same way, you have to use the magic tool to do your analysis and reporting jobs easier and faster. Excel is a vast tool, and to master this, you need to practice and practice using real-time data. Business analysts use this tool to summarize data by creating pivot tables which will help you tremendously in dealing with the training data of your candidates as well as managing the training and tracking. 

Also, you can make different charts using Excel to generate dynamic information related to a training problem. You can use it to create gains development models for new training based on recent training predictions, design an editorial calendar, index costs for products, and make charts to show how near the training is to budget and many more day-to-day tasks. Thus learning excel skills will help you excel as an L&D manager.

• Documentation and Presentation 

Business analysts should register their project teachings and results very well, clearly, and concisely. Similarly, you have to do your training projects clearly and concisely. There you, as an L&D manager, should confidently present your project findings and outcomes. With the help of organized documentation, business analysts can communicate technical concepts easily to non-technical employees. Similarly, you can adopt the best practice to share with your team. You will benefit from jotting down project lessons as this will help you make better decisions in the future.

• Agile and Scrum concepts 

One of the fastest-growing tendencies in the training domain is the boosted demand by organizations for rapidly designed learning content. This trend of “the need for speed” has increased the market for the skills of agile and scrum. While creating training content for your organization, you need to have hands-on for agile and scrum practice to fasten the learning development process. Leaning business analysis, you will get in-depth knowledge of the concepts and get to implement these practices in your training development process.

Conclusion:

Overall, Learning and Development is a domain in which flexibility, cost control, and grade are essential to the success of a training project. Maintaining those factors can equip employees with the help they require to develop and grow.

As an L&D manager, you will be able to convert raw data into more valuable inputs to leverage this data in decision making. With business analysis skills, you can have a better deep knowledge of primary and secondary data emerging from your training activities in business analytics tools. Thus you can be better effective! You can general reports and dashboard information to solve decision-making problems.

Thus, adding on the business analysis skills will allow you to conceive the soundest decision-making skills to improve efficiency and generate more profits for your organization.

Getting our CLDP certification and Business Analyst Certification  combination will be given the advantage of honing the certification in Business Analysis. 

Why wait, then? With the tremendous market demand and skill gap analysis, we are determined to give your business analysis skills an advantage!