20 Interview Questions and Answers for Business Analysts (2023)

In this article, we're sharing the 20 most common business analyst interview questions and answers that you could encounter during a job interview. Being ready for these questions can not only help you prepare for and feel more comfortable in an interview for a business analyst role, it can also identify the gaps you may have in your technical skills.

We’ll start by sharing general business analyst interview questions. Then, we’ll focus on data analysis to explore the most common technical questions you will face.

General Business Analyst Interview Questions

1. What are the main responsibilities of a business analyst?

The main goal of a business analyst is to help organizations solve a problem or defining, recommending, and implementing the optimal solution.

While some of the activities of a business analyst may vary depending by the industry or the organization, here are the key common responsibilities all business analysts share:

If you become an IT Business Analyst, your responsibilities will involve the recommendation, the design, the implementation, and the change management for IT projects.

Further reading

You can read more about a business analyst's primary responsibilities in the following article:

2. What is the difference between a business analyst and a data analyst?

While there are many similarities between these two roles (both work with large amounts of data, make data-driven decisions, need the same soft skills, etc.) there are some important differences:

Business Analyst Data Analyst
Work focus: Identify business needs through digital and non-digital data Identify patterns tin digital data
Works with: marketing, sales, and product teams data scientists and data engineers
Background: business majors technical majors
Skills: business intelligence, project management, data warehousing data cleaning, data wrangling, data analysis, statistics

Further reading:

You can read more about the differences in the following article:

3. What are a business analyst's essential skills?

4. What are the major stages of a business project?

Any business project includes the following global stages:

5. What digital tools do business analysts use ?

Here are some of the tools business analysts use:

6. What documents do business analysts work with?

There are different types of documents that a business analyst uses depending on the nature of their work (such as IT business analysts, business analysts with domain expertise, etc.).

Some of the most common documents that a business analyst uses while working on a project include the following:

7. What kinds of diagrams does a business analyst work with?

The most popular diagrams used in business analysis include the following:

8. What are project deliverables?

Project deliverables represent a set of tangible or intangible results produced at each stage of the project and delivered either internally or to shareholders and clients. These include various reports, documents, proposals, drawings, strategies, and final products and services.

9. What is a requirement, and how is it different from a need?

A requirement is a targeted statement formulated by shareholders and representing a well-documented indication of what they need in order to satisfy a particular business need and achieve a specific business goal. Requirements represent the core of the project; shareholders set them before the project begins, and then a business analyst defines, analyzes, estimates, and prioritizes them. We can say that while a business need is a high-level specification of a desired final result, a business requirement is an applicable, thoroughly documented representation of that business need.

10. Define requirement elicitation, and list its methods.

Requirement elicitation is the process of collecting requirements related to the project from direct interaction with shareholders, customers, and end users. The methods of requirement elicitation include the following:

11. How can a business analyst estimate the quality of a requirement?

For this purpose, a business analyst can use the SMART rule. A good requirement should satisfy the following standards:

12. What is BRD, and what are its major components?

BRD stands for Business Requirement Document. It's an essential formal document that clearly states the project's goals and identifies its key shareholders — including their business needs and requirements, potential risks, and the expected outcomes of the project. A business analyst is responsible for creating this document after communicating with the shareholders.

The key elements of BRD include the following:

Data Analysis Interview Questions

Data Analysis is one of the most important parts of a business analyst's. In order to get your recommendations approved by the key stakeholders and leaders of the Business, you’ll have to convince them that you made the correct diagnosis of the situation. You’ll need to identify the business needs and issues and share meaningful insights effectively. To do that, you will use business intelligence (BI) solutions such as Power BI and Tableau. Here are some of the top questions you will encounter during a business analyst job interview.

13. What are the top business intelligence solutions available to business analysts?

The most used business intelligence solutions for business analysts around the world include the following:

Further reading

You can read more about the top job interview questions about Microsoft Power BI in the following article:

14. What is the difference between Power BI and Tableau?

While both Power BI and Tableau are business intelligence (BI) applications used for business data wrangling, data analysis, and data visualization, there are some significant differences between them:

15. What are the top benefits of a business intelligence solution?

As a business analyst, you will use a business analysis or business intelligence tool such as Microsoft Power BI, Qlik Sense, or Tableau.

Here are the top benefits of using a BI solution:

16. What are the different stages of data analysis with a business intelligence solution?

There are four main stages in a data analysis process with a business intelligence solution:

17. What is data cleaning, and why is it important for your analysis?

Data cleaning is the necessary preparatory (and usually rather time-consuming) step in the data analysis process that follows gathering the data and precedes analyzing it. This step includes the following:

To extract meaningful insights from the input data, it should be reliable, complete, consistent, and representative — this is exactly what data cleaning is for.

18. What should you do if you have missing data?

There are various ways to deal with missing data:

19. What are the key activities involved in data modeling?

20. What makes a good data visual for your data analysis?

The main principles to follow for good data visuals include the following:

Takeaways

Now that you've seen the most common business analyst interview questions and answers, you can prepare for a business analyst technical interview with confidence!

If you want to master or refresh your skills (and get certified!) before applying for business analyst jobs, explore the self-contained Business Analyst Career Path at Dataquest. It will help you learn the necessary technical skills and practice them with real-world projects that you can include in your portfolio.

For more on business analysis, check out these articles:

About the author

Elena Kosourova

Elena is a petroleum geologist and community manager at Dataquest. You can find her chatting online with data enthusiasts and writing tutorials on data science topics. Find her on LinkedIn.