Even A Master’s Degree Couldn't Prepare Me For Business Analysis: Your Path Is Easier.

I’ve been in the Business Analysis profession for over two decades, and I learned the hard way that academic degrees teach you the "Happy Path," not the reality.

While my Master's degree gave me technical theory, it completely failed to prepare me for the "Reality Layer" – the messy office politics, ambiguous requests, and intense pressure that permeates throughout enterprise environments.

Your path is easier because you don't have to spend 20 years learning these survival skills through trial and error. I've distilled these hard-earned lessons into frameworks so you can bypass the burnout and start at the level of competence it took me decades to reach.

Here is the story of my journey...

Academic Illusion & Smart Pivot (1999 -2005)

Unlike most business analysts, I didn't stumble into business analysis by accident; I consciously chose it from day one.

I was undergraduate economics major at York University in 1999/2000 when I realized that an economics degree wouldn't get me the high paying job I needed to pay off all the student loans I was borrowing to fund my education.

One fateful day, overheard two economics majors talking in the cafeteria, and one of them said:

"I'm only doing my masters degree because I can't find a job right now."

That's all I needed to know to make my first major career-life pivot.

I walked immediately to the registrars office that day, and initiated my change of majors from Economics to Information Technology. That pivotal moment put me on track to becoming a highly-paid BA Consultant today.

I spent the next seven years building up credentials – an undergrad in Information Technology, a post-diploma in Database Application Development, and a master's degree in Information Systems & Design.

I knew I didn't want to be a software developer, but those were the only programs that I could patch together to get a solid foundation for business systems analyst roles at the time.

By the end of my studies in 2005, I thought I had everything figured out. I was convinced I'd mastered the profession because I had all the degrees possible, and that would be enough to conquer the workplace.

I had total confidence.

I was wrong.

Then came my first job.

It was at a government agency that I got through the hidden job market. My friend had sent my resume to his manager, I got interviewed, landed the job, and I'd left that job less 6 months later.

I took a pay cut, for a better job, at company would give my much more project execution experience. That was a company that built and maintained nuclear power plants and is now now split into three: this one, this one, and this one.

I started in application support, and quickly got promoted into doing project work. The support work easy for me, but my first end-to-end project was a different story.

That experience totally shattered the confidence I'd built up in my academic illusion.

My Reality Check (2006)

Quite frankly, it wasn't just my confidence. My ego took a massive hit too.

Everything I thought I knew flew out the window in that first project, and I found myself struggling to deliver the analysis to near burnout by project's end.

The analysis skills I'd picked up during my studies were fine – it was the pace, the people, the politics, and the pressure to deliver that taught me how useless my academic education had not taught me what I actually needed to learn.

That's when it all sunk in form me:

The classroom hadn't simulated the messy, people and political factors that make things stressful in the real world. That's something I'd have to start learning the hard way.

That experience forced me salvage whatever I could from my rigorous academic education and figure out how to implement into the real world.

I now knew that I wasn't in the "safe-space" that the academic bubble had given me for my foundational years.

That was the "theory layer". I was now in the "reality layer".

Climbing The Expertise Ladder (2007 to 2012)

That reality check lit a fire under me, and I kept my head down for the next five years to learn the profession for real.

I was moved from project to project and my management gave me increasingly harder analysis work to do on each project they put me on. I was surrounded by high-performing experienced professionals on all these projects, and I wanted to become just like them.

I paid close attention:

• to how the CIO, VPs, and Directors would think about their project pipelines and how they would structure programs and projects.
• to how the Program and Project Managers would lead the business case work and then structure their project teams and plans for the executions stage.
• to how the Dev/Cofig-Leads would architect their solutions before development started.
• to how the Analysis-Leads would manage the backlog of support tickets and then just disappear into a project for months at a time when a new project needed their specific skillset.
• to how the Dev-Ops-Leads would reject my project manager's RFC's because the tech-lead hadn't defined a solid enough recovery plan for the BCP section of their RFC requests.

And most importantly, to how differently the Business would talk about the project team depending on whether their project was going good, or not-so-good.

Not only that, but this is also when I started to build the ODESA and P7 Framework to help me support/lead the analysis work on my own projects.

I'd begun to see some repeating patterns in the projects I was supporting and realized that I could "abstract" those patterns into frameworks that I could repeatedly over and over again.

These frameworks let me just "pick and choose" the analysis work that needed to be done on every new project, instead of having to define a new "BA process" every time I was onboarded onto a new project.

I switched jobs one more time in 2011 to get into the insurance industry, and shortly after, I decided to make my next big move.

By 2012, I was ready to get my money back.

Pivoting To Get ROI (2012-2019)

After 12 years of refining my skills, gaining experience, taking on progressively larger projects, and building my true confidence – I was ready to take on the next stage of my career.

Now I wanted to make as much money possible to get the ROI on the $100K+ I'd spent getting myself educated – Not to mention and all the sweat and stress I'd endured.

I knew that I didn't' want to become BA Manager or a Project Manager – My skills and experience were all about doing the analysis work and I'd begun loving my job because I had mastered all the project types available.

My only option for boosting my income was to transition into freelance BA consulting to get paid hourly, instead of a salary.

I would quit my full-time permanent job at the insurance company, start up my own corporation and begin the long journey into client and contract acquisition for my new independent consulting business.

Enough to keep myself busy doing BA consulting work for the rest of my career – But I'm the type that needs personal growth – so I set myself the next big goal: teaching other business analysts how to survive and thrive in this profession using everything that I'd learned.

I'd kept my eye on the BA training market for years and realized that none of it was good enough. It wasn't good enough for me, and certainly not good enough for business analysts who've landed into the profession accidentally.

In 2015, I started designing and developing my own vision of what a full BA training program could and should be.

My Legacy Stage (2018-Now)

Around 2018, I'd achieved my the financial goals, and felt I'd also hit the top of the the business analysis profession. My consulting projects had started feeling a little stale and repetitive for me, and I felt I needed to do more.

Here's what I did in response.

• Pivot 1: I decided to finally launch our first course + community and rebranded the the entire program from "Applied Business Analysis" to "BA Blocks".
• Pivot 2: I expanded my consulting services beyond just business analysis work into project management, business architecture, and functional solution design.

While I still do deep client work today to keep my skills sharp, my primary focus is now on teaching.

I hope this story gives you a good sense of the type of career that's possible for you.