Information Systems

The work, day to day

Work in this field sits at the join between technology and how an organisation actually runs: gathering requirements from business teams, configuring or customising systems such as ERP or reporting platforms, testing changes, and documenting how a process should work once the system is in place. A business or systems analyst spends much of the week in conversation with stakeholders translating business needs into specifications, while a BI developer or ERP specialist spends more time inside the underlying data and configuration. Coordination with both technical staff and non-technical business users is constant.

Many people enter through a business, information systems, or computer science degree, though the field is unusually accessible to career changers who move in from a business or operations role and pick up technical and analytical skills through project work and certification. A first role is often a junior analyst, coordinator, or support position on an implementation or reporting project, with broader consulting or project-management responsibility following once someone has shown they can bridge a technical team and a business team reliably. Recognised project-management and platform-specific certifications are common and often pursued early in a career.

People who enjoy translating between two groups that do not naturally speak the same language, roughly engineers and business managers, tend to do well in this field. A common misconception is that the work is primarily technical coding; most roles spend more time on requirements, process documentation, and stakeholder communication than on writing software directly, with the technical depth varying a great deal by specific role.