Business analytics is the tool used by professionals to make sound business decisions. It fosters the profitability of a business and helps increase a business’s market value. This is why business owners are keen on employing business analysts or business intelligence analysts to help achieve their objectives.
With the increase in demand for such professionals, you will need to develop cutting-edge skills to land a position. If you don’t want to get certified yet, you should consider completing business analytics projects. These projects will help you gain hands-on experience and showcase to employers your expertise and skill level in business analytics.
5 Skills That Business Analytics Projects Can Help You Practice
Completing business analytics projects can set you apart from other job applicants. These projects will help you develop real-world experience. Whether your focus is on customer relationship management, financial management, human resources, marketing, or supply chain management, these projects will be invaluable to your growth.
- SQL. SQL is a popular coding language used in databases. Through it, analysts and developers write queries to retrieve data from transaction databases. Data scientists and data analysts also rely on the coding language. After retrieving data from the databases, business analysts present the data visually to stakeholders.
- Statistical Languages. Working on business analytics projects will expose you to statistical languages such as R and Python. Analysts rely on R for statistical analysts and Python for programming. A combination of these languages can help you work easily with big data sets.
- Statistical Software. These projects are also quite beneficial in helping you build skills in statistical software. Through the projects, you will become familiar with SAS, SPS, and Excel.
- Data Visualization. A significant part of business analytics involves data visualization. As part of the projects, you will not only learn how to fetch data from different databases but also present them to stakeholders. This means you will get to familiarize yourself with data visualization tools and techniques.
- Machine Learning. As you work on the projects, you will encounter many instances where machine learning is vital. You should expect to use business intelligence tools for curating friendly user interfaces and augmented analytics to receive accurate insights.
Best Business Analytics Project Ideas for Beginners
Being a beginner in the field of business analytics does not mean you cannot pursue projects to boost your portfolio. There are plenty of beginner-friendly business analytics project ideas to help you grow your skills in business analytics. Below we curated a list of the best beginner project ideas to jumpstart your career.
Data on Employee Performance and Resignation
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Data Visualization, Machine Learning
In this project, you will provide a company with data that can explain why employees are resigning. The goal is to take these results and use them to improve the business environment. You can take into account the employee’s distance from home, work culture, or job role. You should evaluate each factor with the relationship to resignation.
Forecasting Sales of a Mall During December
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning, Data Visualization
A mall features a variety of shops and stalls that see high traffic during the holiday season. In this project, you should be able to determine which is the most popular product and how to ensure the shop does not run out of stock. You should check the current inventory and the customer segmentation to ensure you can forecast the sales properly.
Predicting the Success of a Product
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning, Data Visualization
In this project, you can rely on your analytical skills to determine if a particular product will sell well in a specified market. For instance, you can focus on the entertainment industry. With thousands of hours of content being disseminated daily, it is quite challenging to establish which song or movie will do well. You will need to make use of historical data and models to make predictions.
Predicting Sales for an Upcoming Car Design
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning, Data Visualization
This project involves taking a deep dive into customer needs and wants. You can work on a project to determine if a new car design, color, or shape will appeal to the target audience. There is a wide variety of cars available in the market to help you determine the most popular vehicle.
Customer Segmentation
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning, Data Visualization, Statistical Languages
In this project, you will deal with a wide customer base of an organization. The main aim of the project is to provide the best customer segmentation to the business leader, development, and marketing team to design campaigns. You should check on the spending ability of the customers and the most popular products.
Best Intermediate Business Analytics Project Ideas
If you have confidence in your business analytics skills and would like to take on new challenges, you should pursue intermediate business analytics projects. These mid-level projects will open you up to new horizons in business analytics. They can also help in landing a well-paying job position in tech or other fields.
Project Management and Business Analysis
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning
You can get plenty of ideas by reading this paper on project management and business analytics. The paper covers lessons from A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge and A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge. The latter provides a comprehensive guide in the elicitation process, also referred to as enterprise analysis.
The above-mentioned books are instrumental to improving your project management skills and informing you on best practices in the industry. You will start with identifying the organizational problem and finish by defining systems capabilities.
Human Resources
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Data Visualization
This project involves automating processes, multidimensional analysis, self-service access, and recruitment methods. Your goal is to find ways to improve recruitment and retainment for a company while remaining within a set budget. This project will help you develop analytical skills in establishing the sensitive areas of a business that can lead to potential losses.
Business Analytics Capstone
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Data Visualization
If you have a computer science or business degree, you should consider working on this capstone project. This project-based course will help you learn real-world applications for data-driven decision making. By working on this project, you will familiarize yourself with using data to optimize businesses, maximize value, and make operations efficient.
This capstone project will take business professionals through challenges faced by global companies such as Yahoo and Google. You will learn how to use data for addressing business challenges. It’s a curated project by Yahoo to help you master how to make data-driven decisions after complete evaluation.
Sales Conversion Optimization
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning, Statistical Software, Statistical Programming
This is a great project to work on Return on Investment. Through this project, you will be able to develop campaign strategies that will positively impact business operations. You will also optimize the budget to be more impactful by utilizing methods such as email blasting and social media marketing.
Optical Character Recognition
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning, Statistical Programming
You can choose to work on optical character recognition, which deals with converting text in images to typed text. You can find open-source project templates for creating optical character recognition software with Python and Swift. You can program an application that turns handwritten documents into typed ones.
Advanced Business Analytics Project Ideas
These advanced business analytics project ideas can take your expertise to a professional level. These projects feature advanced concepts such as pattern matching, forecasting, sentiment analysis, graph analysis, and neural networks. Find out more about the business analytics project details and the skills you will gain below.
Credit Risk Classification Analysis
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning, Statistical Programming
In this project, you can choose to focus on a particular financial organization or simply generalize. However, the more specific, the easier it will be to analyze the credit risk. You will start by analyzing the historical data of the customer, financial information, and loan purpose.
You should check on factors like age, gender, marital status, job type, and income in your project. This classification tool should inform the business on the best cause of action when issuing credit or loans.
Sales Data Exploration and Reduction
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning
This project will help inform business leaders on the best course of action when it comes to remaining profitable. You can take a deep dive into the project to make it advanced by including the products or services that will generate more value or a higher ROI. You can also add customer segmentation to the project to help the leaders identify the target audience.
Music Sales in America
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Data Visualization, Machine Learning
This project involves assessing factors in music sales like genre, popular artists, and sales distribution. The project will require you to work with Tableau for data visualization. By the end of the project, you will be familiar with top musicians, data mining, data visualizations, and machine learning concepts.
University Fundraising
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Statistical Programming, Data Visualization
To complete this project, you will need to include the degree that attracts the most funds, gift donors, and pledge deals. It is best to present this data individually in Excel or a similar tool. Your project should display your ability to conduct in-depth research, data analysis, data visualization, and statistical programming.
Exploring Aircraft Hardware Suppliers
- Business Analytics Skills Practiced: Machine Learning, Data Analysis, Statistical Programming
This is an excellent advanced project idea in business analytics that tackles the demand and supply of aircraft hardware. In the project, you will be expected to create a menu, explore orders, minimum purchases, forms of payment, and customer preferences. To make it more complex, you can also feature the shopping time.
Business Analytics Starter Project Templates
To complete the named business analytics projects, you do not need to start from scratch. There are exceptional template samples that can help you work on your projects seamlessly. Find a list of business analytics starter project samples below.
- Business Analyst Template Toolkit. Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned business analyst, this template toolkit provides templates to address your needs. You will find about 12 sample templates, work samples, and guidebooks. Each of these templates can be customized to fit your needs.
- Software Requirements Documentation Template. This template features business requirements, rules, reports, user interfaces, and data requirements. It also comes with the process flows, use cases, service level agreements, business continuities, and data security plans.
- Attribute Metadata Template. Data features entities and attributes. Entities are identifiable classes of people or things, and attributes are characteristics that give further descriptions. You can rely on this template for the names, attributes, data types, values, and definitions of entities. You can also add extra segments like risk, priority, complexity, stability, and status.
- Business Analysis Plan Template. This template will help you develop a reliable business analysis plan. Through this template, you can document your business planning activities regarding the project.
- Templates for Business Analysts. Tech Canvas features several business analytics templates to provide a solid structure to use in your organization. For example, they feature a strategy analysis template, solicitation and collaboration template, requirement analysis template, and Pareto analysis template.
Next Steps: Start Organizing Your Business Analytics Portfolio
A well-curated portfolio might be what you need to get to the next level in your career. After you have amassed solid real-world skills from the business analytics projects, you need to know how to present them for job applications. The tips we list below will guide you to designing a winning resume.
Pinpoint Your Achievements
Use your portfolio for marketing your skills and experience. Always try to capture the recruiter’s attention from the onset by displaying your best work. Often hiring managers receive hundreds of applications, so it’s important for you to highlight your achievements to showcase your skills.
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Key in Relevant Information
Align your portfolio to the job requirements and description. Use these job sections to guide you in adding relevant information to your portfolio. You will gauge the skills and experience needed, which will help you curate the best-suited portfolio.
Make It Simple
You must present a straightforward portfolio. Your portfolio should have concise documents which are organized. Keep it updated so that it can be easier for the employer to track your progress over the years.
Business Analytics Projects FAQ
Yes, a well-curated business analytics portfolio can lead to a well-paying career. As a professional, consider aligning your documents according to the job requirements. This will significantly increase your chances of employment.
No, you do not need to learn how to code to complete a business analytics project. However, having basic knowledge of software programming can be highly beneficial. You will have a broad understanding of the technical side of the business.
There are four different types of business analytics. There are descriptive, diagnostic, prescriptive, and predictive.
No, business analytics projects are not difficult to complete. As long as you have the motivation and experience to complete a project, you will be able to see it through. Ensure you have a strict schedule to help you remain consistent.
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