Why This Business Analyst Struggled to Connect the Dots (And What It Reveals About Deep Analysis Skills)

So, Much of, you know, looking at the job functions that uh the the GDs you had sent me, uh, depth analysis was very much a part of kind of what's required. And so, one of the hallmarks, and, and you know this is an engineering student of, of kind of, uh, analysis is sometimes having to link, uh, two or more problems together to correctly identify. An underlying singular issue, right? So, you have two different seemingly disparate problems, but it turns out there's one underlying singular issue. Um, so, give me a time, some example from work or, you know, whatever you have to pull it from, where you had two problems, but real really what you identified was there was an underlying singular problem. First, just tell me what it was, and then I'll, I'll ask the uh the follow-on questions. It could be 2 or more. It doesn't have to be exactly 2, but, you know, what I'm looking for is more than 1 thing was. Symptomatic of a of a singular underlying thing.

yeah, no problem.

anything. Definitely a more, uh, we'll call this a more advanced question for sure. Uh, and it's fine in this, in this case to not have an answer. It's totally fine. We can skip this whole question block, and I'll take off the interview and haven't put on the kind of, you know, the feedback hat, which is, um. Especially for analyst roles, right, where you're kind of having a deep dive and slunk into the data, etc. right? It can't, what, what, you know, companies like the ones, well, one of the ones that you're looking at in terms of who they're looking to hire and the and the quality of personally looking to hire. What they want to know is that you have the ability to think in a nonlinear way, uh, and connect the dots and pattern match across a variety of items when it turns out there might be a singular underlying thing, right? And, and identify those 2nd and 3rd order effects of decisions that are made and, and not, and not think in a very linear fashion. So, that's, that's kind of the root of this question. So, it's fine. It, it's fine. It's not, it's, it's just, I would present it to you as something to think about for sure. Uh, and if you want to talk about it on the follow up, uh, we can have that discussion. But this, this kind of question really separates out, uh, especially based on your level of work experience. You're a little bit light for this question, but I asked it anyway. It's gonna separate out the people who are just kind of the doers versus the big thinkers who can dive deep and really kind of work through a really complex situation and figure out, you know, kind of what was going on.