How to Get More Out of Your Business Analysis Boot Camp

March 3, 2020 Paul Crosby

The Uncommon League offers a 4-5 Day Business Analysis Boot Camp to help your team learn and apply the basics of business analysis. Our boot camp was named one of the Top 10 Business Analyst Boot Camps by CIO Magazine.

This training is meant for teams with some business analysis experience, but that experience is not required. With the tools and training we provide, you will be able to kick off your business analysis program and rapidly train your staff on our best practices.

You can control how effective our boot camp is. With the right preparation and follow up, you can apply our principles for months and years after the training. Follow this guide to make the most out of your business analysis boot camp.

Why Should Your Staff Attend a Boot Camp-Style Training?

There are multiple types of training options in the marketplace, but the boot camp training style often stands out to employers. These trainings are intense and require the full focus on your team, but the investment often drives results.

First, it’s not always easy to find employees who understand business analysis and who can pass on the information to the rest of your staff. Emma Rose Gallimore at Penn Foster explains that high employment rates makes it harder to hire for specific skills. Additionally, the rapid changes in technology and our workforce means employees who were hired with strong skills might need to update how they do business.

In a boot camp-like setting, you can work to upskill your existing employees so they can move your business forward.

This is why boot camps benefit both employees and employers, says Sarah White, senior writer at CIO Online. “Not everyone has the budget or time to go back for a four-year degree and some companies don’t have four years to wait for a candidate to graduate with the right skills.”

With our Business Analysis boot camp, we cram as much information as we can into five days to give your team the information they need and the tools to apply it in their work. Even if you can’t bring on full-time business analysts now, you can attract employees who have these skills and retain those who develop them.

“Providing resources and encouragement for employees to continually upgrade their skills will help attract and retain a dedicated work force,” writes industrial/organizational psychologist Bruce L. Katcher, founder and president of the consulting firm Discovery Surveys.

In the case of our Business Analyst boot camp, some business analysis skills are beneficial, but not required. This is an opportunity to change how your employees work within your company by upgrading their skills. When they realize how they can benefit, they will be more inclined to attend the boot camp with an open mind.

Before the Boot Camp: Prepare Your Team

Before your team is ready for our business analysis boot camp, they need to understand how they will benefit from learning these skills and why they should be excited about the training experience ahead.

This “what’s in it for me” information is important to focus on both before and during the training sessions, the team at Shift eLearning explains. The onus is also on management to provide clear answers as to how employees will benefit from the training. This context allows employees to further build bridges between what they are learning and the work they do on a daily basis.

Providing context increases the chance that the people attending our boot camp really want to be there. Leadership coach Anne Loehr says you can never guarantee that your team members all want to be at the training. However, by building interest in what they will learn, you may also attract other employees who want to learn these skills as well.

Along with providing context for the benefits of this boot camp, show how the company is moving forward with an analysis-focused mindset. This training will affect how you run your business, which is why people need to learn and adapt.

People learn best when they have to learn, writes Steve Glaveski, cofounder and CEO of the corporate innovation and start-up accelerator firm Collective Campus. If there is no sense of urgency or direct need to attend this training, then your team members will treat it as an optional addition to their skillsets. However, when your staff knows that your company is changing, they will focus on the message because it will directly impact their work.

“For the benefits of training to persist, build in expected accountability,” says Jonathan Yagel, vice president of savings program and app Peak Money. Simply knowing that there will be follow-up assignments and work — or that the skills of business analysis will become part of the team’s day-to-day life — will help employees focus on the lessons so they can better remember the content.

Once you have set the stage for the value of the training, your team members can start the boot camp with a drive to learn.

During the Boot Camp: Reinforce the Message

Between each training day of the boot camp, take time to reinforce the messages from the previous session. This post-training review only needs to take a few minutes, the team at information services and technology company BLR explains, but it serves as an opportunity to ask employees about the key concepts they learned and discuss any problems or questions before moving on to the next day. This is also an opportunity to discuss ways to use the business analyst skills everyone is learning and exchange feedback on the experience.

“Feedback is the bridge between training and implementation,” writes management consultant Dan Mann, president of The Mann Group. “It’s what turns instructions into productive, applicable lessons.”

By collecting employee feedback and providing it to your team members during the training, you can make adjustments and help people better understand the concepts.

Callum Sharp at HR and office administration platform Turbine recommends making feedback individualized. This way, employees can know specifically how they can improve and can ask you questions about where they are having trouble. Personalized feedback can create a safe space for discussing issues when given privately, allowing employees to open up more than they would in a room full of their peers.

During the boot camp process, we try to make the learning as interactive as possible. This increases the retention and reinforces the theories that we discuss.

“The classroom style approach may work for young learners, but adults learn differently,” Riia O'Donnell explains at HR Dive. “Research points to experiential learning as the most effective. In essence: hands-on training that applies directly to the work being performed is retained, while last week’s conference is largely forgotten.”

This sums up why we try to make our boot camp incredibly hands-on. We want to engage participants and increase the chances that they remember and use the materials after the boot camp is over.

In an article for Thomas Insights, Kristin Manganello lists micro-learning, just-in-time learning, and employee experience with engaging content as top driving workplace trends in training. These are applied in our Business Analysis boot camp. Participants walk through the steps of our training and connect the content with their experiences. This makes the training modern and effective beyond the traditional classroom.

After the Boot Camp: Apply What You Learned

The last day of the boot camp isn’t the end, but rather the beginning of your team using these materials within your organization. As a manager, you can create ways for employees to remember the materials and apply them to their day-to-day work.

“Implement ways employees can connect with one another, share, and collaborate to reinforce what they learned during training,” recommends Ashley Watkins at eLeap. This concept is called “social learning” and will help employees fill in gaps that they missed or forgot after the boot camp. Your team members can rely on each other to keep business analyst best practices going.

Collaboration is important because the training memory gaps might be bigger than you think. Most employees will only remember 58 percent of what you have covered just 30 minutes after the training, according to data shared by the learning video platform Panopto. They will only remember 35 percent of what they learned a week later. This is why community support and principal application are essential in training. Otherwise, the valuable lessons you could apply from our boot camp will be lost as team members stop applying the materials.

Training and development industry researcher Krista Brubaker encourages managers to create “boosts” for employees to apply what they learned. “The brain will naturally forget what it isn’t using,” she writes at BizLibrary, and these boosts give team members real-world applications of the material. This is useful if there are some elements of our boot camp that you aren’t ready to apply to your organization just yet.

You can determine how much your employees get out of our business analysis boot camp. If your team members are eager to learn, apply and reinforce the materials, then our training can make your company more efficient. We are excited to help train your staff and hope that they are eager to learn from us.