Hi,

I worked as a Technical Author for 10 years and completed an MA degree in the subject. This helped me to appreciate that real technical writing uses many of the core skills also required of a Business Analyst - eliciting business requirements, interviewing techniques, document analysis, stakeholder analysis etc. - although technical writing projects are mostly aimed at documenting systems, products or processes 'as is' (hence the crossover with as-is modelling). It is not that much of a stretch to cover the other classical BA techniques, although I would suggest the ISEB qualifications as a starting point.

For my part, after technical authoring I moved into contract technical business analyst roles because I happened to have long expertise of the general insurance software I was formerly documenting.

Start with a junior BA role while you're studying and build your resume experience from there. There are different specialisms within business analysis, so you could lean more towards pure business consultancy, technical (IT business analyst), management / business intelligence, financial modelling etc. - it is becoming a broad church!

Good luck in the future,

Ian