Aggregated from live Business Analyst postings rather than opinion. Every figure below is measured from real adverts and recalculated daily.
A business analyst sits between the people who know what the business needs and the people who will build it, and spends most of the job making sure those two groups are describing the same thing. That means interviewing the teams who actually do the work, mapping how a process runs today versus how someone thinks it runs, writing the requirements precisely enough that an engineer can act on them, and then testing whether what got built does what was asked. The recurring difficulty is not analysis but agreement: much of the value is in surfacing the assumption two departments each held quietly and differently, before it becomes six months of software.
Aggregated from the live descriptions of postings whose title names the role. Not a shortlist, and not anybody's opinion of what matters.
Share of Business Analyst postings mentioning the skill — a posting asks for many, so these do not add to 100. Measured across postings whose title is the role.
33 of those 419 remote Business Analyst roles are open to candidates anywhere in the world — the rest are remote within one country only. Most job boards do not separate the two.
The same skill list, split by the seniority of the posting asking for it. Bars run right where senior postings ask more often, left where mid-level postings do.
Percentage-point gap between the senior+ and mid-level shares naming each skill. Senior+ includes principal, staff and executive.
Everyone asks for the top of that first chart, so naming it proves nothing. These sit far enough down to differentiate you, and close enough to the top to be worth the effort.
United States 617 
United Kingdom 230 
Thailand 109 
Germany 74 
Singapore 71 
Malaysia 60 
India 51 
Canada 40 Where our listings sit, not the world's — the corpus skews to US and English-language boards.
· United States
· India
· United States
· Colombia
· Germany
· United States
· United States
· United States
· India
· United States
· United States
· India
· United Kingdom
· United States
· Malaysia
· India
· Malaysia
· Malaysia
· Mexico
· Lithuania
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Compare the chart above with the engineering roles and the difference stands out immediately: no single tool comes close to the near-universal rates that SQL reaches for data analysts or React for frontend developers. SQL and spreadsheets lead, but well short of dominance, and what sits alongside them is process and communication language rather than software.
That makes the role unusually portable between industries and unusually hard to prepare for by learning a stack. The signal employers are reading is whether you can hold a messy problem still long enough to describe it, which is why so many of these postings ask for domain familiarity and stakeholder work in the same breath as any technical requirement.
Business analyst is one of the least standardised titles in this set. At one company it is close to a product role; at another it is reporting and documentation; in consultancies it is often a client-facing delivery role. This page covers postings whose title is specifically business analyst, which keeps adjacent titles like business intelligence analyst out of the sample — but it cannot make the underlying roles uniform.
Read the distributions with that in mind, and treat the individual listings as the corrective. The fastest way to tell which variant a posting is describing is to score it against your own CV rather than to infer it from the title.
The ranked list above is measured from live postings and recalculated daily. Broadly it splits into data work — SQL and spreadsheets — process and requirements skills, and the stakeholder communication the role runs on. No single technical skill is close to universal, which is itself the most useful finding on this page.
The chart above shows the distribution as minimums, meaning the lower bound each advert states. Business analyst is one of the more accessible entry points among the roles here, partly because a share of the work is learnable on the job and partly because domain knowledge from another career often transfers directly.
Rarely as a requirement. SQL appears often enough to be worth learning, and spreadsheet fluency is close to assumed, but the postings ask for programming far less than any engineering role on this site. Where a role genuinely expects development work, the description says so.
A data analyst answers questions with numbers; a business analyst works out which questions are worth asking and what should change as a result. In practice the two overlap heavily and some employers use the titles interchangeably — comparing this page against the data analyst one is a reasonable way to see how differently the two are actually advertised.
The work-policy chart above has the split for these postings, including how many are open to candidates in any country rather than remote within one. The role sits close to the stakeholders it serves, which tends to push it toward hybrid more than the engineering roles here.
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Colombia 
Mexico 
Lithuania