On Monday, Forbes published an article that is likely to be relevant to people who are pursuing certain kinds of online information technology training and are interested in finding business analyst roles and responsibilities in new and interesting fields of business.

The article featured an interview with Emmett Williams, the president and co-founder of MYZONE, one of the brands behind the rapidly emerging market for fitness-oriented wearable technology. Forbes essentially sought out his insight into how information technology training and business analyst roles and responsibilities can make the gyms of the future more technologically integrated.Business-Analysis-consulting

Those specific insights are certainly interesting. But more to the point, they ought to provide food for thought for anyone who is currently developing their programming skills and wondering about some of the potentially transformative ways in which they can utilize those skills as part of a future career.

The answers to that inquiry are virtually innumerable. And as we’ve emphasized in various posts in the past, your options for using your online information technology training will only continue to grow as tech becomes more and more integrated into different areas of life and the economy.

The Forbes article should serve as a reminder that, even though the prevalence of IT training is increasingly obvious, there are places where modern, data-rich technology has not yet penetrated. And some of these places are obvious candidates for meaningful and lucrative tech integration.

Forbes and Williams provide a basic account of what this might look like in the case of fitness centers. But the description is by no means comprehensive, and it leaves much to your imagination, should you wish to take on business analyst roles and responsibilities for the industry.

This certainly goes to show the value that business analyst training could add to the ways in which you think about applying information technology skills to a range of different situations and fields. The thought experiment about gyms and information technology can be repeated any time you come across a type of business or activity that your experience tells you could be enhanced by technology, accumulated data, programming algorithms, and so on.

Anyone can develop these insights, but it’s the person who takes on business analyst roles and responsibilities for the business or field who has the best opportunity to fully consider how to go about making these changes. So it should be easy to see why that role is one that you ought to strive to fill early in your IT career.

Whether assumed formally or in the ordinary course of career development, business analyst roles and responsibilities are the things that set the stage for project management and IT training and development. Whether those subsequent roles belong to you or to someone else, the fact remains that it takes a thoroughly analytical mind to lay out the changes that a company or industry needs to remain competitive well into the 21st century.