What is a BI (Business Intelligence) Analyst

We're focusing on a role that impacts multiple business units in an organization: the Business Intelligence Analyst.

A BI Analyst is a bit different than your traditional data analyst role. Their main focus is analyzing past data to provide market or financial reports in an effort to plan for the organization's future decisions and overall performance. In this role, you’ll communicate with multiple stakeholders across the org, and can make a big impact on the company’s growth.

In this list, we’ll take a look at some resources to help you learn the basics and dive into some of the commonly used tools for business intelligence.

1) Business Intelligence: A Complete Overview from Tableau

Tableau is one of the big name tools you’re going to see in this space. While this isn’t necessarily a guided course or self learning program, this article gives a great high-level overview of the role and its impact to an organization.

Before jumping into any sort of coursework, we recommend reading through this article to ensure BI is the career path you’d like to go down.

2) Business Intelligence Concepts, Tools, and Applications course from Coursera

You know we’re big fans of Coursera. Coursera offers individual courses and learning tracks from industry experts and top learning institutions that you can work through at your own pace.

There is a specialization, or learning track, available for BI, but we would recommend at least taking this foundational course to understand the basic concepts

3) Business Intelligence Analyst Course 2023 by Udemy

A great option for a course that starts at the very basics is the latest edition of the BI Analyst Course from Udemy. You’ll have access to well over 400 lectures to learn the ins and outs of different areas of the role, and even dive into commonly used tools like Tableau and MySQL.

4) Introduction to Power BI module from Microsoft

Another big name tool you’re likely going to work with is Power BI. Microsoft has an entire online training platform full of modules that will guide you through learning the tool. This intro module will be the best place to start, setting up the foundational knowledge for you to then jump into some of the more in depth learning paths.

You can check out some of the other available module collections and learning paths from Microsoft here.

5) Business Intelligence Analyst learning path from Maven Analytics

Lastly, if you’re looking for a learning path that covers some of the tools we’ve already referenced (like Tableau and Power BI) and then some, this 16 course path from Maven Analytics is just what you need.

You’ll learn how to “Think Like an Analyst” to kick things off, and then jump into deep dives of multiple tools BI professionals use everyday. After wrapping up your practical education, you’ll end things with a course helping to plan for your new career.

If you’re looking for a role where you can analyze data, turn it into a visual that’s easy to read and understand, and collaborate with different business stakeholders across your org, using these resources to pivot into a business intelligence career should suit your needs.

In the meantime, please consider subscribing to our guided tour through data roles led by people doing the jobs. The series is called "Captain's Compass" and you can learn more about it and sign up for alerts by following this link.