In this episode I cover what it means to be a systems analyst and share from my personal experience spanning three jobs post academia. A systems analysis role is 1) problem solving 2) big picture architecting of how to solve a problem backed by technical analysis 3) not focused on building tools for other users but rather leveraging existing tools and using them for your analysis and only building a tool from scratch if it is needed and in a way where you will be the main user of it 4) making PowerPoint slides on your analysis and presenting this work and spending time understanding how best to communicate through this and for the right audience etc 5) communication with team members or across organizations to do due diligence on what’s been done already so much like literature review before embarking on original research work. This type of role has lots of parallels with academic research and transferable skills from scholarly work would be very useful here.