Cape Town, 18 Oct 2016
Faculty Training Institute is a leading provider of training courses and related services to organisations and individuals across Southern Africa. It recently got a call from one of its clients in Johannesburg who wanted to share with it the difference their business analysis course had made to the competency of their junior business analysis staff, so FTI had a chat with them. The client concerned is a large multinational FMCG company with branches across the globe.
The company sent 11 delegates on Faculty Training Institute's Certificate Programme in Business Analysis. This is a six-month part-time programme and is suitable for both the entry-level business analyst, who needs to develop a good foundation and competence in the essential skills and techniques of business analysis, as well as the practising business analyst, who is seeking a broader perspective and balanced view of their role. It is aligned to the BABOK and covers most of the critical skills, techniques and competencies required by the professional business analyst.
Approximately 50% of the delegates sent by the client were attending an in-house graduate programme and had no business analysis experience at all with the other 50% having between one and three years BA experience. The major reason for sending these people was that "90 - 95% of them were technical and they needed to understand the business side of IT - they needed to bridge the gap in order to deliver genuine results to the business".
What was also essential to the success of this programme was the three-way partnership between FTI, the client company and the delegate. The delegates attended the programme in their own time over the weekends, thus demonstrating their commitment to the process, the company supplied support for them from line managers, the L and D department and from human resources and FTI provided a well-respected, tried and tested learning programme.
A year after the programme was completed, two of the graduate trainees have been retained in full time positions in the IT department and the majority of the graduates have moved into the prestigious role of business partnering and are now called business partners, working with various business functions. The company has specifically commented on their vastly improved document writing, business focus and their better, more understandable and consistent case writing. They say that "they all speak the same language now and this has greatly improved communication and efficiency". They state that they "would definitely recommend FTI for their professionalism, great relationships and their strong personal relationships with both the company and the delegates." They now have many other people interested in attending this and other programmes at Faculty Training and FTI looks forward to building a continuing and mutually beneficial relationship with them.
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