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Trends: Business analyst recruitment

by David Blakey

Is there a pattern of innovation and stagnation in some industries?

[Monday 7 April 2008]


I have noticed that advertising for jobs for business analysts for some life assurance companies state that applicants must have experience of the life insurance sector. You may have realized that these advertisements have been placed by agencies, rather than the clients themselves, on the basis that the clients would refer to their sector as life assurance rather than life insurance. But, that apart, it is interesting that the clients are insisting on experience in their sector, especially for business analysts.

Business analysts analyze an organization's business needs, identify where improvements can be made, and propose changes to make those improvements. I imagine that business analysts work best when they can draw upon their knowledge of a number of sectors, so that they can propose changes that have achieved success elsewhere.

If I were an employer, I would not be keen on employing a business analyst who had mainly worked in my own sector. I doubt that they would be able to apply truly original and innovative thinking to their approach to my problems. If they had left company X to join company Y, they might be tempted to propose the same changes at company Y that they had implemented at company X. They might also be reluctant to propose changes to company Y if company X had failed to implement them.

If I were an employer in the life assurance sector, I would be more inclined to select a candidate from the utilities sector rather than the insurance sector. I would want them to bring ideas from another sector into my business, so that I might be able to use those ideas to gain an advantage over my competitors.

It strikes me that life assurance companies continually recruiting business analysts from within their own sector can lead to stagnation, so that every life assurance company offers the same vanilla product.

It may be because of their recent history that I have noticed that life assurance companies advertise in this way. The insurance industry had to go through a period of business process redesign some years ago. One of them must have decided that it really was not working as well as it could, so it called in consultants who told it that its processes were inefficient. Within a few months, every major company had been through a business process redesign exercise. As a result, claims were settled faster, at less cost.

So perhaps innovation in some sectors only occur periodically. Every now and then, someone decides to make significant changes, and everyone else follows them. External change consultants are called in, do their work, and leave. Then perhaps they settle down into a routine of just swapping the same business analysts - their internal consultants - so that eventually they all serve a single vanilla flavour.

For any consultant, it may be a useful exercise to see whether there is a pattern. In the sectors in which they work, is there a cycle to renewal? Is it predictable? What triggers it? When can external consultants expect new business?

It might even be worthwhile to watch the job ads, to see if anyone wants business analysts from other sectors. Change could be on the way.




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