Business Analyst CV example

What recruiters expect

Before writing anything, it helps to know what the person reading is checking for. In this field that is usually a short, specific list:

• Elicitation technique: workshops, interviews, observation, document analysis - not just "gathered requirements".
• Process modelling with a named notation, and the size of the processes mapped.
• The delivery context: agile, waterfall or hybrid, and the artefacts that context expects.
• Data literacy. Increasingly BAs are expected to query data themselves rather than request extracts.
• Evidence that the solution worked after delivery, not just that it was specified.

Recommended CV structure

This is the running order the example uses. It is a starting point rather than a rule, but the order reflects what tends to be read first in this profession.

1. Profile — Three or four lines positioning you for the role.
2. Core Skills — Grouped skills, for example "Languages" and "Tooling".
3. Professional Experience — Paid roles, in reverse chronological order.
4. Selected Projects — Work you built, with outcomes and the stack used.
5. Professional Qualifications — Completed certifications with the issuing body.
6. Education — Degrees, diplomas and school-leaving qualifications.
7. Languages — Spoken languages with CEFR levels.

Sections worth adding

• Continuing Professional Development — Useful when moving between domains such as finance to healthcare.

Skills worth including

Grouped rather than listed in one block. Grouping makes a long list readable and shows that you can tell the difference between the things you use daily and the things you have touched.

Beyond the technical list: Asking the question nobody wants asked, Facilitating between operations and technology, Writing unambiguously, Managing conflicting stakeholder priorities. These belong inside your experience bullets, demonstrated, rather than in a list of adjectives.

Example professional summary

Three or four lines, positioned for the role rather than describing your personality. Two versions you can adapt:

Business analyst with six years in general insurance and operations change. Work covers a claims intake redesign that removed 14 process steps and four handoffs, requirements for a policy amendment journey across three functions, and self-service SQL analysis that halved escalations on one product. BCS Diploma in Business Analysis.

Business analyst working in a hybrid delivery environment: process and requirements definition up front, story writing and refinement with the build team throughout. Comfortable querying the data myself rather than waiting for an extract.

Writing your experience

The difference between a CV that gets a call and one that does not is almost always in the bullet points. Each pair below shows a real rewrite of the kind of line that appears on most CVs in this field.

Taken from the example

The sample CV for this profession is fully written. A few sections from it, so you can see the level of specificity that works:

Experience

Senior Business Analyst, Clydebank General Insurance

• Mapped the 41-step as-is claims intake process in BPMN and designed a to-be process with 27 steps, removing four handoffs between the contact centre and the back office.
• Ran nine elicitation workshops across claims, underwriting and compliance for the new policy amendment journey, resolving a conflict between compliance record-keeping and the two-minute handling target.
• Queried three years of complaint records in SQL and found 62% of escalations came from one product variant with an ambiguous renewal notice; rewriting the notice halved escalations on that product.
• Wrote 130 UAT scenarios and coordinated testing with 12 business users, logging 41 defects of which 9 were requirement gaps rather than build errors.

Projects

• Claims intake redesign — As-is and to-be process modelling, requirements and UAT for the end-to-end claims intake journey.

Education

• MA (Hons) Economics, University of Glasgow — Upper Second Class (2:1)

Certifications and registration

• BCS International Diploma in Business Analysis — BCS
• BCS Practitioner Certificate in Requirements Engineering — BCS

Common mistakes

ATS considerations

Applicant tracking systems behave differently by sector, and generic advice is often wrong for a given field. These points are specific to business analyst applications:

• Include "requirements gathering" and "requirements elicitation" both, since employers split between the two terms.
• Spell out "user acceptance testing (UAT)" once so both forms match.
• Name the notation - "BPMN 2.0" - rather than only "process mapping".
• List SQL if you have it; it is a genuine differentiator and frequently a stated requirement.

The Minimal ATS layout is built for this, and the ATS guide covers what parsers do to a file in more detail.

Guides that go deeper

This page applies general CV advice to one field. The full treatment of each part is here:

• How to Write a Data Analyst CV — Every bullet point should end in a decision someone made differently. Dashboards with no audience are activity, not impact.
• How to Describe Work Experience — The difference between listing duties and demonstrating impact, and a repeatable way to rewrite any weak bullet point.
• How to List Skills on a CV — Group them, be specific, and cut anything you would not want to be interviewed on for ten minutes.

Questions about business analyst CVs