5 Skills Every Business Intelligence Professional Should Obtain

Part of what makes a highly desirable business intelligence professional is the depth of experience they have. BI is a hybrid role that combines technical skills with business acumen and management soft skills.

Here are five skills a BI professional should fine-tune:

Depth of Experience in BI

You want to show employers a progression of responsibilities at each company you’ve worked at. Maybe you started as a business analyst, then moved to data modeling. Ideally, you want to experience in these common BI roles: ETL, reporting, architects, data modeling, project management, business analyst and management.

Industry Experience and Knowledge

Industries that have regulatory and compliance obligations only want to hire candidates that are familiar with these regulations. This includes finance, healthcare, insurance, and education. You will greatly increase your value by becoming actively involved in your industry, by joining user groups, advisory boards and attending or speaking at industry-related events.

Business Acumen

BI professionals need to engage and interact at all levels of the company. Learning and having an appreciation for each departments goals and responsibilities will help you relate to others and understand how your BI data can help improve the company. For example, the BI the marketing department wants is to justify to the finance department whether to increase next year’s budget in search engine optimization. Or, customer success needs BI to figure out where in the customer funnel monthly subscriptions are being canceled.

Technical Skills

Many ETL tools are similar to each other and while you want to highlight your specific level of skill with Tableau or Datastage, you also want to relay to employers you can easily transition your skills to any software that is query based like SQL. Focus on the types of reports you’ve run and the actionable business decisions that were made because of the data.

Big Picture and Detail Oriented

Paradoxically, both of these skills are required. Often BIs are working in the minutia – or digging in the weeds to understand all the subtle details. The ‘weeds’ may entail where it is sourced from, what are the transformation rules, who uses it, who owns it, etc. At the same time, you need to understand the organization’s vision, how this translates into the various strategic, tactical and operational level objectives and then how to translate the objectives into KPIs, metrics and measures that link to detailed data elements.

BI Professionals – Top Skill: Continuous Learning

Keep fine-tuning your BI skills; perhaps the most important skill is to continuously learn and evolve as a BI professional. Your value to your current or future employer is providing new actionable data to help the business move in a positive direction. By improving your technical skills, or by becoming more involved in the industry or learning more about the goals of the accounting department – you become a highly valued asset.

ASB Resources – Business Intelligence for Growth

Our BI experts combine analytic skill with the ability to create actionable reporting. Contact ASB Resources’ Business Intelligence experts to learn more about our services.