Business Analytics BSc

Hello people

Anyone got any experience or knowledge of doing Business Analytics? My son is keen to accept an offer for this course from Southampton but apart from the course info on the website I can’t find much else about the subject. Also the tutor we saw at the open day says numbers are usually pretty low for the course - is this a bad thing???

Never seen a BA course at undergraduate level before. That's interesting. Wouldn't say it's a bad thing that numbers are low - I'd imagine this is quite new?

What I will say is that you don't need a formal education in analytics to go into business analysis/intelligence (BA/BIE). Any subject (including humanities) is sufficient provided you put in the work outside of studies to learn programming and typical reporting tools. Your son should also aim to get a BA/BIE/Data Engineering internship between 2nd and 3rd year so he has real-world projects to talk about at interviews when going for graduate jobs. Looking at the course details it looks like they don't go into the usual BA bread and butter tools/tech like SQL so he might want to learn that himself and same for Tableau/PowerBI (although these things lend themselves better to self-study as it's not really academic).

Thanks for your reply; he’s also concerned the subject might be very IT focused which I k is will be part of it but it’s not where his main strengths are. He has a good head for numbers and logical problem solving with a long term career steering towards finance & risk, sadly the majority of the finance courses are split with accounting which really doesn’t float his boat.

If IT/tech isn't his focus then perhaps this isn't the degree (or the career) for him. Depends on the company but for the most part it's all about using technology to generate insights from data and presenting/delivering that to business stakeholders to make decisions. I'd say you do need a keen interest in tech/IT to enjoy this kind of role.

If his long term aim is to get into finance and risk (+ a good head for numbers/problem solving) then perhaps he will enjoy more traditional courses like maths/physics? You don't need to do a specific finance course to get into these careers - just make sure he gets work experience through (paid) internships.