Business Analysts are the people in your organization who are asking ‘why’ – why a process happens the way it does – in order to understand what the business needs from its technology.
What else? They’re much more prevalent than you might think. With demand for these roles rising and the industry changing with them, what does the future look like for budding business analysts? Let’s take a look.
The Big Tuna
The Business Analyst role has existed for some time in the Salesforce ecosystem, however, the conversation has picked up in pace with Salesforce releasing the Business Analyst certification and advocating for the career path on Trailhead.
Does it surprise you that Business Analysts could be the most in-demand role in the Salesforce ecosystem? According to the Salesforce Talent Ecosystem Report ‘22, the year-on-year demand for Business Analysts grew by a whopping 55%.
To put this into perspective, we can refer to it as the “big tuna” compared to the other Salesforce roles:
In fact, as the report states:
- Supply vs demand: Business Analysts saw the highest global supply growth (34% YoY) and highest demand growth (55% YoY).
- Business Analysts showed the highest demand growth in every region except India.
- Business Analyst is the only role that saw an overall increase in growth rate from 2021.
- The demand ratio for Salesforce Business Analysts to Salesforce Administrators in North America is more than 3:1.
Source: Salesforce Talent Ecosystem Report ‘22.
Impressive statistics – but where is this data coming from?
What Demand Data is Used?
10K View, creators of the Salesforce Talent Ecosystem Report, gave some insight into their methodology:
Job listings are analyzed across three job boards (LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed) that had representation in all of the geographies researched, and were also frequently used by Salesforce customers and partners to find talent. They have reviewed Salesforce Business Analyst supply and demand for the past three years.
Demand for Salesforce Business Analysts: Driving Forces
From a relatively uncommon role in the Salesforce ecosystem to shining in the spotlight – what’s going on to make Business Analysts so desirable?
Business Analyst Certification
As mentioned earlier, Salesforce launched the Business Analyst certification mid-way through 2022. It quickly became a popular credential.
From what we’ve observed, the certification becoming so visible has led individuals from across the Salesforce ecosystem to think: “I am already doing business analysis”. For example, the parallels between business analysis and marketers were immediately apparent to me after passing the exam.
Therefore, individuals would have added this as a skill to their profiles, or even rebranded themselves as budding business analysts.
Admin Role Diversification
Salesforce admins have been a staple role in the Salesforce ecosystem ever since Salesforce has existed. An undertone has been circulating the ecosystem – the opinion that the number of Salesforce Admins has saturated the job market.
Whether you agree with this opinion or not, there’s been a noticeable shift in Salesforce Admins looking for complementary skill-sets to boost their desirability, and future-proof their careers. In fact, you could say there’s been a resurgence of the Salesforce admin role, armed with additional skills – business analysis, sales ops, DevOps, and many more.
Admins “rebranding” themselves, wishing to try their hand at something new, could be driving the supply rise for Salesforce Business Analysts.
The change in expectations is interesting. Note the change from “tactical” to “strategic” – from “do this, do that”, to “why are we doing this; how does it meet business objectives”?
Salesforce Customer Base Growth
It’s notable that the business analyst role and skill-sets are platform agnostic – not tied to one particular technology. Yes, Salesforce Business Analyst is a specialization, however, the skills are transferable.
With Salesforce gaining more customers each year, and those customers investing further across the Salesforce product suite, the demand for experienced professionals grows. Business analysts may be transferring from working with other technologies and moving into the Salesforce ecosystem to get their “slice of the Salesforce pie”.
Salesforce Implementation Complexity
On a similar note, the average organization’s use of Salesforce is becoming increasingly more complex. With more Salesforce products and integrated applications, as well as more data to process and store, it means more dependencies between features, teams, etc. exist.
Planning and deploying changes becomes a big “ship” to steer, and it gets harder to not get tangled in the “weeds”. Money invested by organizations makes higher stakes: if they fail to adopt this shiny new tech, it’s money down the drain. Successful business analysts are worth their weight in gold if they can work “on the ground” with teams to ultimately steer the “ship” into calmer waters.
Final Thoughts
An impressive set of findings about Salesforce Business Analysts – with some likely driving factors.
Note that these findings are based on year on year growth. Taking a step back, in the overall job posting, Business Analysts hold a minority share (16%) compared to other roles that have been popularized in the Salesforce ecosystem for longer (i.e. Admins, Developers, Consultants). It will be interesting to see how this leaderboard changes out over the next 12 months.
