Get That Job Daily: How to be a business intelligence dev

Every working day this month, as part of our New Year, New Job 2014 special, Develop brings you a game industry professional to explain what their job involves and key advice to help you follow in their footsteps.

Business intelligence developer

Brett Partridge, business intelligence developer at InnoGames, describes what it takes to technically advance the commercial prospects of this successful free-to-play studio.

What is your job role?
I am currently a business intelligence developer at InnoGames in Hamburg. My Role consists of designing, developing, debugging, monitoring and troubleshooting business intelligence solutions. To be more specific, creating tools to assist our business departments in their decision making process.

How would someone become a business intelligence developer?
With the right qualifications, there are plenty of opportunities out there. Just take a look on any job search website, or like myself, via LinkedIn. Business Intelligence has been around for a while now and is becoming commonplace in the games industry.

What qualifications and/or experience do you need?
As a general rule, you would need a degree in information systems or something equivalent. Also, as I work with Microsoft Business Intelligence suite, it would help greatly to have experience or be certified in Microsoft Business Intelligence. This requires knowledge of SQL Server Management Studios, Integrated Services, Analysis Services, Report Services and a general overview of data warehouse and ETLs (extract, transform and load).

What do you look for when recruiting a new business intelligence developer?
This person needs to be comfortable with the Microsoft BI Suite and the query languages that come along with it. They would also need to be a good communicator, as they will need to work closely with stakeholders and other technical departments. Finally, they should be able to visualise the end product when provided with requirements.

What opportunities are there for career progression?
As with most development roles, career progression can go in two different directions. Firstly, you can head down the technical road, which would involve becoming a specialist in the business intelligence field. This will create opportunities to become a senior developer or a consultant. Secondly, you can follow the management career path and we all have a general idea what lies down this way.

Why choose to follow a career in your field?
I think it’s great to be able turn masses of raw data into an end product that provides so much decision-making value for all areas of the business.

If you’d like to get involved with Get That Job Daily, contact aaron.lee@intentmedia.co.uk. You can take a look at all the available business vacancies over at our Develop Jobs section.

This feature is part of New Year, New Job 2014, Develop’s month-long guide to games recruitment. You can read more at www.develop-online.net/jobs2014.