Systems Analyst

What are the attributes/skills of an effective Systems Analyst?

Attributes:

• Analytical skills: The ability to understand the organization and its functions, to identify opportunities and problems, and to analyze and solve problems.
  
• Technical skills: The ability to understand the potential and the limitations of information technology.
  
• Management skills: The ability to manage projects, resources, risk, and change.
  
• Interpersonal skills: The ability to work with end-users, other analysts and programmers. You must also act as the liaison between users, programmers, and other systems professionals.
  
• Additional skills not listed in the lecture or the reading text that are a must are self discipline, the ability to work alone without direction and a healthy dose of problem solving skills. These can apply and enhance the four skills listed above.

Two ways a person can develop those attributes/skills.

Skill development is a life long process that is never ending. We are all imperfect and have areas that could use refinement, and enhancement. The moment you stop developing your skills is the moment that you could handicap yourself in certain areas.

First you must poses the desire for self improvement.

Second you must poses persistence. You must be determined to get backup on your feet after you have been knocked on the ground. Dust your self off and resume professionally your task at hand. Without persistence your desire can be squash by unforeseen events.

Next is simply do. Practice, Practice, Practice, Practice!

Next, do not fear failure. Embrace it and use it as a learning tool to achieve success. Learning from ones mistakes can lead to huge rewards in the future. Also learning from others failures is just as important.


Developing your Systems Analyst skills in your working environment.

There is opportunity of every moment of every day where one has the opportunity to develop their skills. Even though I have been out of traditional school for a very long time. I have never stopped learning, practicing and enhancing my skills. Sometimes it is easy; sometime it is hard. Sometimes it is very successful; sometimes it is a failure.

I was once told that you fail 100% of the time you do not try. This is something that I always keep in the back of my mind when evaluating my next move.