New: Roadmaps ordered paths through our cheat sheets and flashcards, so you always know what to study next.
Explore themSee what's new on GitHubFrom your first stakeholder interview to a business case and backlog a delivery team can actually build from.
A 13-step learning path. Follow it in order, or jump to what you need.
This path is for anyone stepping into the bridge role between business stakeholders and the technical or data teams building the solution: an operations coordinator moving into analysis, a junior PM picking up BA duties, or someone changing careers into business analysis. Plan on about 5 to 7 weeks at a few hours a week, moving from stakeholder analysis and requirements elicitation through process mapping, user story writing, and SQL-backed reporting. It stays on requirements-gathering and process work rather than going deep on SQL, dashboards, and BI tooling, that ground belongs to the Data Analyst path, or on scheduling, risk registers, and earned value, which Project Management Fundamentals covers in full. By the end you can run a stakeholder-mapped requirements workshop, translate what you heard into a documented process map and a prioritized backlog, query the data behind a business rule yourself, and steer a change through to actual adoption.
Expected: no formal business analysis background. Helpful but not required: basic spreadsheet comfort and having sat in on a work project, even informally, so the vocabulary in the first few steps has something real to attach to.
Open this first: BABOK's six knowledge areas give you the shared vocabulary this whole path builds on, letting you place any BA task, from a stakeholder interview to a signed-off backlog, into the bigger picture the same day you read it.
Builds on step 1's stakeholder analysis table: before you write a single requirement, map who holds power and who just needs updates, so the elicitation sessions in step 4 target the right people.
Puts step 2's stakeholder map to work: build the feasibility case, cost-benefit numbers, and success criteria that get an initiative funded before any requirement gets written.
You can identify who actually decides and back that decision with a business case that survives scrutiny. Next up: turning that green light into requirements a delivery team can build from.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
This is where requirements precision clicks: turn step 1's overview and step 3's approved case into elicitation sessions that separate functional needs from non-functional ones and trace each back to its source; expect ambiguous asks to feel maddening before the vocabulary settles.
Step 4's interviews and workshops only work if the room stays on track: facilitation is the skill that keeps a requirements session from turning into an unstructured gripe session, and turns it into decisions.
Draws the current and future state that step 4's requirements only described in words: a process map makes handoffs, bottlenecks, and duplicated steps visible in a way a bulleted list never does.
Slices step 6's end-to-end process and step 4's requirements into a sequenced backlog: user story mapping is how a wall of requirements becomes an order a delivery team can actually work through.
You can elicit requirements, keep the room productive, map the process they describe, and hand off a sequenced backlog, and a few minutes of due flashcards keeps step 1's BABOK vocabulary sharp while you build on it here. Next up: proving what you found with real data.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
SQL is where querying clicks for most BAs: instead of waiting on IT for a report, you pull the transaction history yourself and check whether the pattern stakeholders described in step 2 actually holds; expect the syntax to fight you before SELECT and JOIN feel automatic.
Take this if your BA work leans data-heavy: window functions and CTEs let you validate a business rule against actual transaction history instead of trusting what stakeholders in step 2 assume is true.
Turns the query results from step 8 into something the stakeholders from step 2 will actually open: a dashboard that keeps the business case's success criteria from step 3 visible instead of buried in a spreadsheet.
You can query the data yourself and put it in front of stakeholders in a form they'll actually check. Next up: closing the loop so the change actually sticks.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Worth a look if you're heading toward owning BI tooling and semantic models rather than just requesting reports: the broader data-and-reporting foundation the Data Analyst and BI Analyst paths cover in full.
Pick this up if requirements sign-off keeps stalling because nobody's sure who approves what: RACI turns step 5's workshop outputs into one accountable owner per decision.
Pulls every earlier step into the outcome that actually matters: the stakeholder map from step 2, the case from step 3, and the requirements and process work from steps 4 through 7 only create value if people actually adopt the change, which is the full loop a working business analyst closes.
You can map stakeholders, build the case, elicit and model requirements, back them with data, and drive the change through to adoption. That's what the Business Analyst Essentials badge certifies: you're the bridge that turns business needs into something real.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Finish every required step, at least 70% of them genuinely done (not skipped), to earn this badge and 500 XP.