I agree with Tom. If you are not a senior business analyst with a lot of years in experience, it is more beneficial for you to take the time to learn and train on all the business analyst knowledge areas and get a lot of hands-on business analyst experience.
If you are a senior business analyst or you have already gotten trained in all the business analyst knowledge areas and you are looking to improve your visibility in the industry or company, you should look into getting a certification.
Nowadays, you may not even be able to get a certification without the requisite hands-on experience.
The same issue shows up in becoming a certified project professional. It is partially answered by having a 2nd project professional certification which is cheifly education oriented. It is called CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management).
I believe it is more helpful to take the begining course-work and to get an entry-level job as a BA than to pursue the BA certification. The BA certification will be helpful after your career has been launched to increase your visibility to your management and/or to get another BA job or contract.
Tom
Just a quick note, I am planning to go for CBAP Certification and have reviewed the BABOK closely. It is indeed true that there is a pre-requisite of 7500 hours of practical BA experience. But more importantly, if someone has a certain level of experience, it would be relatively easy to pass the test. Otherwise it may prove to be quite challenging, even though not impossible. I worked as PM for sometime and took the PMP test in 2004 after reading the material for only 20 ~ 25 days and passed. Hence, experience definitely helps...
-golam
DariusD and others,
What you can do is to have a look at other certifications. I wonder if in North America only CBAP is known, there are two other certification programs, namely IBM Certified Specialist for Rational Requirements Management with Use Cases and also "IREB Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering Foundation Level. Check these links: http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/certs/38010002.shtml, http://certified-re.de/en/mission/whats-re/.
I know that they both do not have the title BA in their names, but basically they are quite comparable to the CBAP-certification. The IBM-certificate is supplier dependent (IBM, RUP). Both certificates do not require any work experience. I can imagine that the IBM-certification is also quite well known in the North America, I don't think this applies to the IREB-certification which seems to be primarily initiated in Europe and a very young one.
Myself I'm from the Netherlands and CBAP certification is hardly known here (and I guess elsewhere in Europe). It seems to be quite strange, why is this so?
Greetings,
Dmitry
Hi Dmitry,
The British Computer Society also has a reputable certification as part of their ISEB program - this might be of interest to you since they are in Europe:
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.7704
- Adrian
Hi All,
Back to the original question "Which comes first the CBAP cert or career as BA"...
If you have a career as a BA, what do you need certification for??? Certification is irrelevant in my job market (Australia) and I suspect in most markets. Save your money and buy beer instead.
Kimbo
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