Yaseen Patel is a business analyst at Saratoga with three years of experience, and he volunteers with the IIBA South African Chapter as their Social Media Manager.
As Yaseen’s career progressed, he needed to enhance his business analysis competency by adding new frameworks and approaches to his repertoire – all while gaining an internationally recognised certification.
By choosing the Foundation in Business Analysis course he achieved both: gaining many valuable learnings and becoming ‘certification rich’.
Learning a structured approach
Yaseen wanted to sharpen his analysis skills by learning new methods and techniques.
He choose the foundation course, as he knew it would give him a solid base and the sound analytical mindset to produce high-quality outputs. In particular, he wanted to focus on strategy analysis and the making of business & financial cases.
Ultimately, Yaseen needed a structured approach to help guide him as he performs the business analyst role and the ability to better communicate the value-added through his business analysis activities.
Plenty of valuable learnings
Yaseen had many AHA moments on the course, and found that discussing and challenging the material as a group increased the quality of his learnings. Relating the course text to real-world examples also helped to demonstrate where and how the techniques can be used in practice.

Though at the beginning, Yaseen was worried about the amount of content versus the course duration. But to his relief, BCA training courses are carefully facilitated to ensure delegates are understand the material and Yaseen was able to do exactly that.
“Going through the material to discuss the key areas made me very comfortable with the time-frame of the course, which is a bit scary at first,” said Yaseen.
Certified and ready to go
With the help of Business Change Academy, Yaseen passed the BCS Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis.
At the same time, Yaseen is confident that his new knowledge will have an immediate impact on the quality of his work.
“Being ‘certification rich’ always feels great,” says Yaseen. “But my eagerness to implement the learnings in my current projects is the real benefit.”
