Before we started BeamJobs, one of our co-founders was a business analyst for five years, so we know firsthand that there is an incredible amount of variability in what a business analyst does day-to-day.
Because of this wide range of responsibilities, it can be really hard to build a resume or write a business analyst cover letter. Here, we’re gonna lay out all you need to know about your business analyst resume.
These resume samples have worked to help fellow BAs land jobs at great companies like Stripe and Microsoft. We’ll also share some tips that we’ve learned from other great business analyst hiring managers to help you land that first-round interview.
Why this resume works
- Your business analyst resume works best by illustrating a blending of a well-defined career path and a data-driven resume outline.
- You’re on track to success if you’ve started your business analyst career by pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business. According to current job-seeking best practices, having a bachelor’s degree is a fundamental starting point that is guaranteed to land an applicant a minimum of an internship.
- Displaying internships becomes less critical if you’ve already landed roles in business analysis after graduation.
- As time progresses, a proven history of dedication and experience is established by years of work as an analyst. From this point forward, experience and niche skills are the only deciding qualifiers needed to climb the ladder of seniority.
Why this resume works
- Business analysts are constantly on the lookout for new ways to improve operational efficiency, and they want the same mindset in their interns. By highlighting times you’ve taken the initiative to streamline systems, you can show off your knack for spotting bottlenecks—and fixing them.
- While your resume only has room to highlight projects, a cover letter writer is a fantastic tool to discuss relevant personal projects to bridge your gap in professional experience.
Why this resume works
- Like various companies’ mission statements and industries, your entry-level business analyst resume can take many shapes and forms. However, several key components can make yours stand out and rise above the rest.
- A bachelor’s degree in business is an extremely versatile tool that can be leveraged in many ways. If your resume includes an excellent GPA, it will ensure the reader’s eye will see a 4-year degree has been completed.
- Your degree is essential to beat out the droves of competition in this field.
- Including a carefully-customized resume objective can also give entry-level candidates an edge, providing employers a quick glimpse into who you are and why you specifically want to work with their company.
- Complementary to the bachelor’s degree, internships provide recent graduates and sometimes nearly-graduated students with real job experience. While some internships and apprenticeships can be found outside the realm of inherent academia, a clear majority require an intern/apprentice to be a current or aspirational degree holder.
Why this resume works
- When you’re applying for a junior-level role, maybe you lack relevant work experience. Adding a career objective helps an employer connect the dots between your past performance and the position you want.
- Look for themes in your work history that relate to the role you’re applying for and highlight them at the top of your junior business analyst resume.
Why this resume works
- As a senior business analyst, you’re at the top of your field: a field heavily steeped in well-documented data and reporting. When updating your resume skills list on your senior business analyst resume, you must collect two primary data sources.
- The first is the position’s list of required skills if you are singling out a particular company. This list will give you the exact skills needed to excel in the role for which you’re applying.
- The second source takes a general look at desired job titles in a specific geographic location. After evaluating the market’s desired skill requisites, you can adjust your expertise to the general “heartbeat” of what employers in a given area are seeking.
- Once the general “heartbeat” of the desired market has been identified, emphasize specific bullet points with KPIs to complement and enhance your credibility.
Why this resume works
- There’s a bounty of lucrative SQL business analyst positions you can go after. The dark cloud? You are not the only treasure hunter. Thankfully, a polished resume gleaming with role-relevant wins can see you shine brighter than your competition.
- Consider the brilliance of including a phrase like “analyzed SQL queries for performance optimization, cutting query execution times by 49% and boosting database performance for over 1,084 users” in your SQL business analyst resume. It’s the kind of evidence not only proves your prowess but translates your technical achievements into clear business value.
Why this resume works
- Your SAP business analyst resume is the epitome of elegance, and that certainly puts a positive spin on things. Intrigued, the recruiter will want to know more, but if your resume doesn’t make way for that, you might as well forget about that lucrative job you’re after.
- How do you tell the recruiter more and make an impression? It’s super easy! Add a direct link to your LinkedIn profile in the resume’s header section. Be careful, though; a run-of-the-mill profile can make the hiring manager think twice about bringing you on board, so optimize yours accordingly.
Why this resume works
- For a solid banking business analyst resume, let the experience section be a ledger of your business acumen and sharp problem-solving expertise. That way, it could be easier to catapult your piece to the top of the pile, garnering a healthy interest from the hiring manager seeking a candidate with your finesse.
- Within the work history section, emphasize quantifiable accomplishments, not just duties, to show off your talent for successful execution-something like analyzing and revising risk management tactics, reducing financial discrepancies by 26% y-o-y. A little caveat, though- keep your descriptions concise.
Why this resume works
- A flawless supply chain business analyst resume that puts your outstanding skills and impressive capability to drive business decisions in the limelight will definitely have recruiters thinking you’re the right fit for their business.
- Sure, you can list those 8 or more skills and stop there, but your chances of landing an interview are pretty slim. Why not go the extra mile to provide examples of how you leveraged them to enhance the supply chain process? For instance, mention that you used SAP ERP for supply chain management and cut procurement costs by 16-now that’s something!
Why this resume works
- Since a good part of your work is going to contain automation, you cannot miss out on adding the necessary skills for it!
- Having tools like IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding and Microsoft Azure ML will create a strong impression on the employer and give the idea that your RPA business analyst resume is well beyond the average candidate.
Why this resume works
- Sure your job is to make business processes more efficient. But let’s be honest, any company will only hire you when you can help their bottom line and save costs.
- This is a great time to add bullet points like “realizing $1.5M+ in cost savings through optimized vendor negotiations” to your business analyst retail domain resume. Don’t forget to add metrics for other finances such as cash flow and profit margins, too!
Why this resume works
- Deploy your ServiceNow business analyst resume’s career objective to paint a picture of a passionate hard worker who will inspire the team to perform and achieve goals.
- Merge that passion with the willingness to unleash your expertise and experience to help the potential employer be ahead of the competition.
Why this resume works
- Two things should outshine everything else in your finance business analyst resume. One is accurate data reporting. This means there should be no room for errors. The other one is reliable financial trend and pattern forecasting.
- In that regard, achievements such as reducing errors by 21% and 14% improvement in forecasting accuracy deserve to be highlighted.
Why this resume works
- The best way to prove that you’re actually a pro at the skills you list in your IT business analyst resume is to show those same skills in action in your work experience section.
- What tools did you use for API testing or creating visual models? What project management tools contributed to your success? As you write your bullet points, look for ways to integrate these skills naturally.
Why this resume works
- The way you present your achievements has a huge impact on how your Salesforce business analyst resume is received. Emphasizing your skills is not enough—you need to show how those skills are applied practically and how they can drive meaningful business results.
- Include specific projects where you utilized Salesforce Agile Accelerator or Informatica Cloud to streamline business processes, demonstrating your hands-on experience.
- Detail how your analysis, perhaps through Tableau or Salesforce Reports and Dashboards, influenced key business decisions.
Why this resume works
- Healthcare is a highly specialized field with a language all its own. If you can demonstrate that you’re already up to speed on the skills and systems required to succeed, recruiters will take notice.
- For example, highlighting your Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems (CPHIMS) credential on your healthcare business analyst resume shows you can bypass the industry’s steep learning curve.
Why this resume works
- A compelling business process analyst resume has more going for it than a simple list of software skills. It should actively spotlight how you’ve used (and will use) these tools to enhance business operations.
- For example, detail a project where you used Appian or Celonis to streamline a critical business process that improved efficiency or reduced costs.
- Showcase how your use of Tableau contributed to better-informed decision-making through data visualization.
- This approach gives your resume a practical edge, spotlighting your tech proficiency and your ability to leverage it in real-world scenarios.
Why this resume works
- As a technical business analyst, you go a step beyond identifying areas for improvement—you design the solutions. Showcase your ability to build new systems with a prominent skills section.
- For example, highlighting SQL on your technical business analyst resume proves that you can create databases for the enterprise.
Why this resume works
- If you’ve hit the ceiling of your career progression, specializing can be a smart move. To build a strong AEM business analyst resume, you need to position yourself as an expert in the content management system.
- Emphasize how you’ve applied your knowledge of AEM to own impactful projects in an enterprise. Clear examples will build your credibility and improve your chances of landing an interview.
Why this resume works
- Agile business analysts look at how a company operates – conducting research and analyzing data. By analyzing and understanding the data, Agile workflow implementations can then be made to improve company KPIs further down to individual team members.
- Build credibility by starting with a firm foundation via a bachelor’s degree in business and then completing that foundation with a lengthy internship.
- Once one to two years of experience has been gained, including multiple KPIs, it will demonstrate a history of driving value.
- It’s inevitable and essential to continue building your proficiencies when developing your career. Yet, including too many, too few, or unrelated skills can easily confuse the reader by appearing to be a “dabbler of many, but master of none.”
- Continue tailoring your Agile business analyst resume with a singular target role in mind. For example, suppose you sell the target company specifically what you know they’re buying. In that case, it’s an easy win, even if your overall years of experience are below the “ideal candidate” minimum.
Why this resume works
- Your operations analyst resume should focus on one obvious thing: operational analysis, primarily. Reinforce as much operational, analytical data as you can by including improvement/enhancement KPIs to showcase the overall impact on the company’s bottom line.
- Business operations analysts are streamliners; you’re a professional with a track record of increasing an organization’s results and decreasing unnecessary waste. Nothing emphasizes this more on your resume than starting each job description bullet point with an active verb.
- Avoid personal pronouns, adjectives, or non-active verbs. Start with strong verbs, such as “analyzed” and “improved.”
- Use our free resume checker for additional information on using active verbs.
Why this resume works
- Business systems analysts can be called BSAs, computer systems analysts, and even systems architects. But no matter the label, you are defined by helping an organization operate more efficiently and effectively through the design and implementation of information technology systems.
- There are hundreds of different technologies that can be utilized to achieve the mission of a business systems analyst. It’s paramount to research the job market to see which skill specifics apply to you.
- Skills like Looker, Tableau, and SQL rank highly in this specialized job market.
- In the business world, companies seek individuals who are consistent in producing results. While you should directly state your impact in your job description bullet points on your system analyst resume, you can indirectly speak to your consistency and reliability through your template and format.
- Be consistent with formatting. Headings, font, and even sentence punctuation (or lack thereof) should be consistent.
Why this resume works
- As a business intelligence analyst, you’re tasked to gather, clean, and analyze data like revenue, sales, market information, or customer engagement metrics in a business. BI analysts are also asked to program tools and data models to help visualize or monitor data.
- While a business analyst’s overall job field description can be quite broad, your business intelligence analyst resume should do an excellent job of honing in on a specific career trajectory, complemented by quantifiable data.
- Whenever possible, it’s preferred to include key metrics and quantifiable high-performance indicators. However, in the field of business intelligence analysis, numbers and data are your “raison d’être” or your “reason for being.”
- Having a well-established career trajectory of College Graduate → BIA Intern → BIA Junior → BIA provides a proven and well-documented history of growth and improvement over time.
Related resume guides
Writing Your Business Analyst Resume
My favorite part of being a business analyst was that no two days were the same. One day I might be deep in the weeds of complex SQL queries and the next I’d be talking to customers to understand how they used our products.
This wide scope of responsibilities made the job exciting and challenging. No two business analysts have the same job so it can be really hard to know what to put on your resume to appease hiring managers at different companies.
I’ve hired business analysts, I’ve applied to jobs as a business analyst, and I’ve reviewed thousands of business analyst resumes at this point in my career. Fundamentally, you have to make the case that you’re capable of having a meaningful impact on the business you’re applying to.
This holds true whether you’re an entry-level business analyst looking for your first full-time role or you’re a senior business analyst looking for a promotion to management. Make your case that you’ll have a meaningful, positive impact in the role you’re applying for.
In short, here are the ways to make sure you accomplish that:
- You need to include the right skills on your resume to get past the automated keyword filters that companies use. Then you need to convince the hiring manager that you deserve an interview.
- Follow the basic rules of resume formatting. Keep it to one page, don’t get too fancy with your resume design, and don’t have any spelling or grammar errors.
- With your work experience and projects convince the hiring manager you can have a positive impact on their business by quantifying the impact of your past work.
How to showcase your business analyst skills
Compared to other tech roles, the scope of hard skills that business analysts need to have are relatively consistent across companies.
While the kind of analysis that a business analyst does from role to role varies drastically, the underlying tenets of the role remain the same. A business data analyst takes in data and leverages their insights to improve business processes or operations.
Whether that happens through forecasting, pricing, reporting, or statistical analysis, the toolbox that a successful BA needs to have is well defined.
First, you need to be able to prep data for analysis. More often than not, companies store their data in relational databases. So this means you need to know SQL to pull and clean that data.
If the quantity of data that a company has is significantly smaller, you might get all the data you need to analyze right in (usually very sloppy) Excel workbooks.
After the data is prepped you need to do your analysis. That can come in the form of interactive models (in which case you’ll likely be using Excel) or you might need to do a more sophisticated analysis in Python or R.
Finally, you need a way to present your findings. Again, sometimes this can just be visualizations in Excel (Excel is the true business analyst MVP), sometimes it can be through data visualization in a BI tool like Tableau or Looker, and sometimes it might be through a presentation in PowerPoint.
Skills to include on your business analyst resume
- SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQL Server)
- Excel, Google Sheets
- Powerpoint, Google Slides
- Tableau, Looker, Chartio
- Python, R
- Salesforce, Netsuite, Hubspot, Pipedrive
- A/B testing, linear regression, logistic regression
Notice a theme here? Only include hard skills in your skills section. Think of it this way: if you were reviewing a resume and someone listed they were a “team player” in their skills section, would that tell you anything about their qualifications?
No, it wouldn’t. Soft skills are best demonstrated in an interview. Listing them on a resume just doesn’t add any value.
The other thing you have to consider is that there are two stages of resume review:
- Companies use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to automatically filter out resumes based on certain keyword filters.
- The hiring manager or HR person in charge of screening for the role will look at your resume.
When companies use keyword filters, they only ever screen for hard skills. So soft skills won’t help you get past phase 1. And like I said before, just listing soft skills on your resume won’t convince the hiring manager you actually possess those skills.
How can you balance your skills section to satisfy both the ATS and the hiring manager? First, don’t include a long laundry list of skills. This is a big red flag to the hiring manager even if it will help you get past the ATS.
For example, there is no reason you would include Python, R, Matlab, and SAS on your resume. When it comes to your skills section you want to avoid coming across as a jack of all trades and a master of none.
It’s much better to demonstrate expertise in a handful of skills than a passing understanding of 15-20 skills.
When you’re debating whether or not you should include a given skill on your resume just ask yourself if you’d be comfortable being asked questions about that skill in an interview.
Lying on your resume is one of the only guaranteed ways to make sure you’ll never be able to get a job at a company at some point in the future. For me, I also wouldn’t be able to handle the anxiety of potentially being exposed for a resume lie in an interview. It’s not worth it!
Get your business analyst resume format right
Formatting your resume properly may matter more than you think. For any given BA role a hiring manager reviews 100+ resumes. To that end, they’re looking for a reason to say “no” to any given application they review.
Formatting your resume incorrectly is a quick way to get placed into the “no” pile. Your goal with formatting your business analyst resume is to make the job of the hiring manager as easy as possible.
Put yourself in their shoes. Given the same exact experience for two candidates would you be more likely to approve the resume that extends to 5 pages or the resume that concisely makes the case for their qualifications?
Here are the high-level formatting tips you should keep in mind for your business analyst resume:
- Keep it to one page. If it’s longer than a page, the hiring manager will likely only skim it.
- Unless you’re customizing your business analyst resume summary, don’t include it on your resume. It’ll just take up space.
- If you’re a senior business analyst, keep your education section really short. If you’re an entry-level business analyst, include relevant classes you took in school that make you qualified for the role.
- Don’t get too creative with your formatting. Your resume needs to be machine-readable so don’t include any images or charts.
- Include links to any relevant work, projects, or write-ups you have.
- This can be your LinkedIn, Github, personal blog, publications, etc.. Anything that makes the case about your skills as a business analyst.
Since your goal is to keep your resume to one page, every inch of real estate is valuable. If you’re a senior business analyst this means you need to keep your education small to allow for more room to talk about your work experience.
Conversely, as an entry-level business analyst, you need to make the case that you’re qualified to be a BA without much (or any) work experience. To do that, you should include relevant math/statistics/economics/programming classes you took in school.
Business analyst education section: senior vs entry-level
- Senior business analyst
- Only include the essentials. Your school, the degree you earned, and your major.
- You don’t need to include your GPA.
- Entry-level business analyst
- You need the essentials (school, degree, major)
- Include relevant classes you took that make you qualified to be a BA
- This can be classes in mathematics, statistics, economics, programming, business classes, etc.
- Include your GPA if it’s above 3.2.
Business analyst resume summary or objective
Spoiler alert, most (90%+) of business analyst job applicants don’t need a resume objective or resume summary.
Why? The overwhelming majority of them are too long, too generic, or don’t provide any new information about a candidate’s qualifications for the BA role they’re applying for. Because of this, a lot of hiring managers have been conditioned to ignore this section (especially when it’s too long).
If you’re going to include a resume objective, make sure it actually adds value to your resume. Here are some ways you can do that:
- Talk about why you’re specifically interested in working as a business analyst at the company you’re applying to.
- Customize your resume objective for each job you apply to; this means carefully reading each of those business analyst job descriptions!
- Read what you’ve written. Is it just generic, meaningless buzzwords? If so, then it’s better not to include it.
- Keep it to two lines or less. Longer than that, the hiring manager likely won’t read it.
To clarify this point here are some samples of good and bad business analyst resume objectives and summaries.
If you’re looking for more inspiration we’ve compiled over 100 resume objective examples you can use.
WRONG – meaningless buzzword bingo
Looking to leverage my analytical skillset to turn messy data into actionable insights for a mission-driven company
WRONG – way too long
Business analyst with 7+ years of making meaningful impacts with my analyses. Comfortable working cross-functionally with teams ranging from product to engineering to leadership. Experienced with turning vague product requests into business requirements that are implemented in a streamlined manner. To date, in my career, I’ve driven $3.7M of value through my analyses and recommendations.
RIGHT – demonstrating a specific interest in the company
As a former small business owner, I’m excited about the prospect of leveraging my experience leading data-driven product recommendations to further Stripe’s mission of making payments accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Quantify your impact on your resume
The goal of a business analyst is to leverage data to make recommendations that have a demonstrable impact on a business or product. More than anything you need to make it clear on your resume that you have this capability.
How can you do that? By showing that you’ve done it in the past! You need to estimate the impact of the projects you’ve worked on.
One of the toughest challenges of being a business analyst is trying to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable. How can you estimate the potential revenue impact of a feature that hasn’t been launched? How can you estimate the impact of a pricing change on customer churn?
These are challenges that business analysts have to deal with in their day-to-day. By estimating the quantitative impact of your past work you’re clearly demonstrating you have a knack for logical, numerical reasoning that is essential to succeed as a business analyst.
The impact of your projects doesn’t just have to be stated in terms of revenue impact. Here are some other ways you can go about it.
Ways to quantify your work as a business analyst
- Improved customer conversion rate
- Example: Leveraging Google Analytics and Excel identified a gap in the product funnel and made a recommendation that improved customer conversion rate by 10%
- Saved manual reporting time
- Example: Streamlined and automated a key business report in Tableau that saved the team 10 hours of reporting each week.
- Reduced costs
- Example: Using SQL and Excel recommended that we end our contracts with our worst-performing vendors resulting in a cost savings of $100,000 annually.
- Built data visualizations to help executives
- Example: Built data visualizations in Excel to demonstrate the efficacy of our sales operations and marketing resulting in the close of a $1.3M Series A.
- Improved customer retention
- Example: Determined through analysis in Python that emailing customers who had been inactive for 7 days resulted in a retention improvement of 7 basis points.
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Example: Using SQL and Excel, identified common complaints amongst new customers leading to changes that improved new customer satisfaction by 14%.
When it comes to demonstrating the impact of your work it’s important you focus on the most important metrics relevant for a given project. Being able to determine the success vs failure criteria of an experiment is pivotal to being a good business analyst.
Just to hammer the point home one last time I want you to compare these two work experiences. Now, this is the same business analyst talking about their experience in a certain role in two different ways.
Which do you think is more effective in convincing the hiring manager they’re a highly qualified business analyst?
WRONG – vague description of work experience
Insurance Company
August 2014 – August 2016, Washington DC
Business Analyst
- Identified procedural areas of improvement through customer data to help improve the profitability of a nationwide retention program
- Using Python, SQL, and Excel developed and owned the reporting for a nationwide retention program
RIGHT – specific projects with demonstrable impact
Insurance Company
August 2014 – August 2016, Washington DC
Business Analyst
- Identified procedural areas of improvement through customer data using SQL to help improve the profitability of a nationwide retention program by 7%
- Using Python, SQL, and Excel developed and owned the reporting for a nationwide retention program, saving ~100 hours of labor each month
Project ideas for entry-level business analysts
If you’re an entry-level business analyst, I know what you’re thinking: “Stephen, this whole section is focused on work experience but what if I don’t have work experience as a business analyst?” (P.S. I don’t actually know what you’re thinking, I just needed a decent segue)
The beauty of being a business analyst is that you don’t need work experience to demonstrate the skills needed to succeed in a full-time role!
Fundamentally a business analyst needs to ask a question, gather data to answer that question, and analyze the data to provide a convincing answer to that question.
You can do that on your own! Talking about a project you worked on to scratch your own itch demonstrates to a hiring manager that you have the desire and skills to succeed as a business analyst.
Get creative! Have you had a question you’ve long wondered about? Think of some data you can gather and do a write-up about your findings.
To get your creative juices flowing here are some questions I’ve thought a lot about and how I might go about answering them.
Sample business analyst projects for your resume
- Have the New York Mets (my favorite team) had bad injury luck?
- I would gather data around the value of each player on the roster in terms of their output over the last 10 years and the number of games they missed each season. I’d then compare this to other teams in the league and do a write-up.
- Are entry-level business analyst jobs really entry-level?
- I’d look at some of the most popular job boards for business analyst job descriptions. I’d manually gather attributes about each of the job descriptions and do a write-up.
- What is the most valuable skill for a business analyst to have?
- Look at salary data and job descriptions of business analyst roles across the country. I’d control for confounding factors like years of experience and try to tease out what individual technical skill most correlated with a higher salary.
- Do people actually like Oscar movies?
- I’d look at the box office and public reviews of movies nominated for the “best picture” Oscar as far back as I can get reliable data and do an analysis trying to answer this question.
- Do west coast ultra-runners perform better than east coast ultra-runners? (ultra-running is a hobby of mine)
- I would get public data around the top 200 ultra marathons each year going back as far as I can get data. I’d then compare the hometowns of top performers to see if accessibility to trails and good weather correlate with performance on race day.
How to Write a Great Business Analyst Resume
No matter if you’re a senior business analyst or an entry business analyst looking for your first role, the north star of your resume should be to demonstrate to the hiring manager you’ll have a meaningful impact on their business!
- Only include hard skills in your “skills” section. If you would not feel comfortable being interviewed about a given skill, don’t include it.
- Keep your resume to one page and triple-check for spelling and grammar errors. More likely than not you should not include a resume objective or summary.
- Demonstrate your numerical reasoning skills by quantifying the impact of your past work as a business analyst. If you’re looking for your first BA role, include projects you’ve worked on your resume.
It took me 66 applications before I landed my first business analyst role in 2010. I know looking for a new job is generally miserable, so try to keep your head high.
You got this! I’m rooting for you. If there is anything I can do to help you land your next business analyst role, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
