Salary is the biggest determining factor in most people’s career choices. So how much do business analysts actually make?
Business analyst salary information can be hard to come by, but LinkedIn has started making this information available to its users. This is a February 2019 review of the salary data for business analysts in the United States and in Canada.
Your salary as a business analyst depends largely on the type of business analyst that you want to become. This is one of the many subjects we cover in the FREE lessons of the BA BLOCKS training program that we’re just releasing Feb 20 2019.
Episode Transcript
For most people salary is the single biggest determining factor of what career they’re going to choose for themselves and so that begs the question How much does a business analyst actually make. Short answer to that question is seventy thousand dollars according to LinkedIn. The average salary of a business analyst in Canada and the United States is seventy thousand dollars. But as analysts, we know that the short answer doesn’t always give you the full picture. So let’s dive into the numbers to see what else we can learn.
So the 70,000 dollar number that I quoted you comes from linked ends salary explorer. You can see here in Canada the total compensation on average for Canadian business analyst is seventy thousand dollars. And that range of salary goes from 50 thousand dollars to ninety five thousand dollars. If we look at the same picture for the United States we can see that again the number is very similar. It’s around $70,000 dollars US per year for a business analyst. And that range, ranges from $50,000 dollars all the way up to $102,000 dollars. Now these numbers are a summary of the overall job market in the United States you can see here that this is based on close to 20,000 responses that have been given by LinkedIn members to LinkedIn on how much money they make for their business analyst roles in the companies that they work in.
If you look along the side here you can see what business analysts salaries look like at specific companies, so General Motors for example, the average salary of a business analyst working at GM is ninety four thousand five hundred. Fannie Mae $91,000. Bank of America $90,000 Boeing $90,000. Morgan Stanley $88,000 dollars per year. And the salary explore all shows it shows you how many different respondents they’ve had in order to accumulate those numbers.
So this should give you an overall big picture of what the salary looks like. Bear in mind that the salary information that we’re looking at is across all different industries for all years of experience so that might not necessarily give you the picture that you’re looking for. If you’re just starting off as a new business analyst chances are you’re going to want to click on the years of experience here and select somewhere maybe there less than one or between 1 and 5 and see how that updates the salary information. So here for example for us, it has shown us that the average salary for starting business analysts starting to intermediate business analysts to have between 1 and 5 years of experience is sixty-seven thousand dollars so slightly lower than the average. If we look at the business analysts that have 15 plus years experience you’re going to get an average total compensation of eighty eight thousand dollars and you can see that the range for these also switches. So if you’re a much more senior business analyst the maximum it looks like at the top end of the range here is one hundred twenty five thousand dollars per year for those roles.
And that’s based on 20,00 responses so far. If you scroll down a little bit more you can start to see a bit more of a breakdown of what the business analyst role looks like for senior members so you can see it by industry. You can see by company size you can see by education level and by field of study, meaning the field of study that business analysts have had before and they’ve gone into into their BA careers.
One thing to note is that generally speaking you can see that companies that are larger in size, so companies here that have 10,000 or more employees tend to pay closer to the top end of the BA role where and smaller companies tend to pay slightly less. Just that’s just one of the data points that can help you make your career decision.
Now if you click on this view jobs link over here on the top left-hand corner you can see that LinkedIn is going to bring up all of the currently open business analysts roles that are open in the United States and there is about close to 60,000 jobs for business analysts available on LinkedIn as of right now. We are right now in February of 2019. I’m going to school down here and let’s see if we can pick a business analyst role at a company that is a little bit better known. Let’s look at Amazon.com. We have a business analyst role that is that has domain knowledge in marketing. So let’s click on that and see what the requirements are for that job.
So most job postings will give you a job description that tells you a little bit about what the company is, and about what the job is, and then they quickly get into the major requirements of the job. And as you can see one of the first jobs that they look for here is advanced SQL which gives the business analysts the ability to query databases without having an application. Now you can look at some of the basic qualifications that they’re looking for five years of experience and from just a quick scan of this job posting I can tell you right away that this would be much more of a business systems analyst role because the major give away for that is that there is a lot of very heavy data management related skills that they’re looking for in this role.
So what are our takeaways from this video? Take away number 1 the LinkedIn Salary tool is at your disposal. You can use it to see what the BA salaries look like in the markets where you’re going to be looking for work yourself, and it’s likely that the quality of the data is going to continue to improve over time as more analysts start to give their salary information to LinkedIn.
Takeaway number two, the business analysis career pays pretty well. Average salaries look like they are hovering around $70,000 dollars a year in both Canada and the U.S. And for more senior roles, we’ve seen that there are salaries that can go up to $125,000 a year.
Takeaway number three is that business analyst jobs typically come in one of three different flavors. The business analyst, business process analyst, or the business systems analyst. And that is part of what we cover in the free training that we’re making available on February 20th 2019.
I’m going to encourage you to go up and sign up for a free membership and to start to learn a little bit more about how you can start to plan your own business analyst career.
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