Hi Kelly,
Adrian has covered all the most important points.
A couple of other things to consider...
1. the ISEB qualification has no authority. It is created and run by a self appointed organisation. I have never seen a job have as mandatory the ISEB Diploma (sometimes it is a desireable attribute though and of course it does show a level of (financial if nothing else!) commitment on your part).
2. There are other self appointed BA organisations and exams - the IIBA and CBAP for example is probably the next biggest.
3. IIBA have meetings (tend to be London centric but sometimes take place out in the bush) and these meetings are good places to meet other BAs.
4. From your comment re SQL and VBA in this post and comment about being ultimately being a PM in your original post I would suggest that before committing to BA that you analyse whether it is the right career path for you by answering these questions
- what problems or opportunities are there in your life that lead you to think that BA is the route for you? Example: You want to become a PM (according to your original post)?
- What measures would you monitor to say that problem has been fixed or opportunity exploited and what target for these measures equates to success? Example: one measure might be "job title" and the target measure might be "PM"! There might very well be many of these objectives or measures of success and that would normally be the case. It is likely that each problem or opportunity will have many measures of success. It might also be the case (and is likely) that one measure of success will be measure of success for fixing more than one problem and/or exploiting more than one opportunity.
- what would I need to do to affect the measure job title such that it equals "PM"? Example: Personnel records need to be updated to reflect job title "PM". There might well be many of these
These points are the critical ones so you have to be brutally honest with yourself as everything that follows should be geared at achieving the above - if it isn't you are wasting your time! Having got a rock solid view of what needs to change to achieve your measures of success you can analyse what you need to do to achieve them:
- What are the processes to get personnel records updated? Example: My line manager needs to notify personnel.They will only do that when they have promoted me to PM. They will only promote me when...Of course, there will be other processes to achieve this such as: I get a job with job title "PM". In order to do that I need to apply for the jobs. In order to apply for the jobs I need to meet relevant job selection crieteria. The relevant job critera are blah blah blah so I need to to get blah blah blah. To get blah blah blah I need to ...
You won't have all the information to hand so you can do things like as in this forum, have a look at jobs you would like to be considered for and categorise what they are looking for and so on. This could result in a long term plan so make sure it is the right plan by making sure it is achieving what you want it to achieve, and documenting it so you can review and refine as needed and monitor your progress.
By the way, doing all this kind of work is the same style of thinking you would do as BA on any project...
Hope that helps (a bit, anyway?).
Guy