Introduce your self

In this blog we are going to discuss the most important initial question in almost all interviews:

“Introduce yourself”. This question is important because most of the time it drives the remaining discussion, particularly when the interviewer has no preselected list of questions. He/she will ask questions from the points mentioned during your introduction. Therefore, you must have complete command over the terms mentioned during your presentation. Qualities an interviewer is going to judge in your presentation would be:

• How much prepared you are?
• How you are presenting and the way you have structured/organized your presentation?
• Your communication skills and your confidence. 

You can use the following tips to organize your presentation:

• Limit your speech to not more than 3.5 to 4.0 minutes. You can practice this using a (cellphone) timer. Make sure you speak clearly and in plain English.
• Make sure the speech content is in line with your resume.
• Begin with a thank you note to demonstrate that you really value the opportunity.
• Present your educational qualification, credentials, and certification you have.
• Present your work experience in chronological ascending order i.e. start when you started working in this field, your first job. Few tips you would want to include are:

o   Name of the organization, role and time period in years or months;

o   What were your activities in that role;

o   What methodology and special tools (if any) you used;

o   If you have numbers of projects to present then select a few which are relevant to the position; and

o   Be brief in your initial projects and elaborate on your recent projects.

• At the end summarize your presentation to reemphasize that you are competent candidate for this position.

The interviewer can put this question in different ways such as:

• Can you tell us about your IT experience/background?
• Can you tell us about your Business Analysis background?
• How do you think you are best suited to this position?

-          What were your roles in past few projects? What were your day to day activities as a BA?

The responses for all these are same only difference being that the organization and structure of your response. I am going to provide some sample introductions which you can use to construct your own response:

Sample:  

Sample question:

Q: Could you please tell us something about your IT experience/background?

Sample Response:

First of all I would like to thank you / the team for selecting my profile, and taking the time and effort in discussing this opportunity with me. 

As far as my educational qualification is concerned I have a <degree last completed> degree .  I have <certification name> certifications. I am active participant to <community name> community.

Talking about my IT background, I have <number of years> years of IT experience including <number of years> years of strong business analyst experience.

I started my IT career in <year> with <company1 name> in their <project name> project as a business analyst. As a business analyst my work was to elicit requirements from the customer/business, analyze and document the requirements.

Between <year1> and <year2>I worked for clients such as <company 1>, <company2>, and <company3> as a business analyst. The roles were technical. At <company1> the project used UML diagrams in their requirement elicitation, analysis and design process. I developed business requirement documents, functional specification, and worked with development and testing teams.

In <year3> <company2 name> I lead a team of 4 BAs. <project name> project we build end to end system. The project used agile methodology where we had 1 month sprints ending with a release. We used UML diagrams extensively and generated blue print codes. 

Since 2011 I am with <company3 name> as a business analyst. Our main client is <client name>. We are using business process modeling to analyze the processes. We are eliciting and managing, analyzing, and documenting requirements. We are also supporting development and testing teams. We are using Requisite Pro, Visio in our processes.

To summarize, I have <years> of business analysis experience with through understanding of BA’s role in SDLC. Having development, management and analysis background make me a perfect fit for all kinds of analysis work required in a project.

Lastly, I would like to say that I am a proactive hard working person with strong interpersonal skills. I enjoy challenges and look to creative solutions to problems. I often got the best performance ratings in the companies I worked for.

Next I will post a sample for:

“Can you tell us about your Business Analysis background”?