@Akarsh – I am on the same boat buddy … trying to move to newer domain internally and outside organization…. Domain is what they want doesn’t matter if the person is not from technical background or not…. a total non-techie person will work as system analyst since he/she is Domain SME /functional consultants … when they prepare SRS good knows how developers understand what they have to develop now…

I am techno-functional and covert business and IT requirements well but that does not suffice industry need they need Domain SME or programmer.. sigh..

or become a programmer analyst .. the person is basically a developer who is asked to work as BA to gather client requirement and assign work to self and their team to develop the solution… the worst part is these people fail to understand business side of it and they deliver a code without understanding the need of it…. they are programmers and speak all technical words which causes a gap in understanding… thereby taking up change requests when business actually tests them during UAT…well happy to know there are not much bugs but we asked for x and u developed x+z or y.

@Adriana and alan – Yes competition is huge and recruiter can’t compute how that BA is better then other (except ur CBAP etc ) … if u havn’t worked on particular domain they simply won’t call candidate for an interview..

Changing domain can be difficult as employers expect you to have a reasonable amount of relevant experience. It requires a bit of luck
In my case it came down to a combination of availability and general broad experience of determining requirements. The project I joined was running late and needed a BA ASAP; I told them I could start tomorrow but would prefer the day after.
What I did do on arrival was to learn fast. I took the opportunity to research using the internal Intranet to find out what was going on. I was then able to asked questions such as how does this project affect project X – questions that no-one else was asking. As mentioned in other posts you can, with caution, play the newbie card and get people to explain things in a broad context
Best of luck Alan Jones (Scotland)

You have mentioned some great points, i believe in too it’s good to have domain knowledge to ask more number “Whys” to stakeholders to understand the requirement thoroughly also to provide great suggestions.

I posted that question as i work on Manufacturing domain when i was exploring job opportunities on Business Analysis usually lot of companies are not ready to provide the opportunities that easily into a new domain as they are very specific on their domain requirements (even though i have good amount of experience on Business Analysis ). In searching new job on Business Analysis into new/different domain has given me big challenges.

Thank you for sharing the links.

@David – I agree with you understanding a new domain does not take very long , just that i have found it hard to move to a new domain in different organization as they have straight away rejected saying we need people with specific domain experience.

@Adriana – I think you made the perfect point on “level of competition ” and also i agree on the associations may help on the basic need but might not serve the required purpose for change of domain.

As of right now I may be was not “at the right place at the right time” to get hired into new job without domain experience

Absolutely true, if not exactly the topic at hand.

I have always believed this is true because most managers can’t determine the skill level of a BA — we are about the most misunderstood group of people in any company — so they go with domain experience as the only criteria.