Ashley Douglas, APTD talks about HER #BadAssBA journey at our monthly trailblazer meetup I co-lead with the amazing Vanessa Grant
If your skills are called “soft”, you may be explaining them the wrong way
A question from a recent panel really stuck with me:
How do you communicate the value of skills like business analysis, training, and enablement — when people still dismiss them as “soft”?
Ashley answers: You don’t always convince people by telling them.
You convince them by letting others tell your story.
In this case, value came from a strong network – people who had seen the impact of good learning design and thoughtful enablement. When they spoke up, the work carried more weight, more credibility, and more volume than self-promotion ever could.
What also stood out was how naturally training and enablement emerged from BA work.
Even while working as a Business Analyst, she kept getting pulled into:
🍌Demos
🍌Client conversations
🍌Explanations that connected why as much as what
Not because she was “great at presenting”, but because she was teaching while analysing.
That created a powerful arc:
Start as the BA → stay through delivery → finish with training and adoption.
End-to-end ownership.
Amazing.
And when the opportunity came to build a learning function from scratch – first inside consulting, then as a Learning & Development Director – it worked because she’d lived the consultant experience herself.
The learners felt seen.
“Soft skills” don’t need louder advocacy.
They need better evidence – and often, a few allies willing to speak up for you.
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