Entry Level Business Operations Analyst Jobs in Chicago, IL

BTS is a consultancy specializing in the people side of strategy. For four decades we've been designing powerful experiences that have a profound and lasting impact on businesses and their people. We help the world's leading companies turn strategy into results.

Our next-generation approach combines deep business knowledge with transformational development to help people and their company evolve together. We equip leaders for tomorrow, inspire new ways of thinking, and build critical capabilities through working sessions, workshops, offsites, and more.

The Strategy Alignment and Business Acumen (SABA) team builds business simulations and models that sit at the heart of many BTS experiences. Our simulations help leaders visualize their role in their company's strategy and understand how their decisions move the business.

As a Business Analyst in a Strategy & Business Modeling (SBM) role, you'll participate in discovery interviews, co-create the design of the simulation experience, build both the client participant facing UX and the model, and facilitate the simulation experience for client audiences. You'll also help shape how AI shows up inside the experiences themselves: including bespoke chatbots and custom agents.

BTS is also using its unique expertise in business modeling to partner with our clients to help them adopt AI throughout the organization. As an SBMer, you will be one of the go-to experts within BTS to facilitate live working sessions with clients to help participants map their workflows to build their own agentic workflows and applications.

This work is fast paced - you'll be staffed on multiple projects at once, across different industries, with different internal teams.

• Participate in discovery interviews with client stakeholders and translate what you hear into a gamified model of how their business runs
• Design and build business simulations and models and an expanding set of AI tools that let us prototype and ship faster than we ever could before
• Build AI components into our experiences including practice bots and coaching agents

Work directly with both client teams and BTS colleagues to identify high-value AI use cases from AI-powered simulations to AI enablement engagements where we help clients automate or accelerate workflows.

• Co-create the simulation design with the client so the experience hits their objectives
• Deliver, facilitate, and present the end solution to client teams from front-line managers up to the C-suite
• Help leaders make sense of complex business models by presenting simplified, yet realistic models rich with tradeoffs that matter
• Train clients on the AI tools we leave behind so the work keeps creating value after the workshop ends

• Help leaders see how their decisions ripple through the business and the impacts they have
• Bring strong business and financial expertise to every engagement so the model reflects what matters in the client's world
• Contribute to a fast-moving point of view on how AI changes businesses and how BTS uses and delivers it to clients
• Analyze simulation data and provide real world insights back to the client

Curiosity. Resourcefulness. A humble and inclusive spirit. These are core attributes of BTS all-stars.

On top of that, this role needs:

• Strong business and financial acumen and a love for problem solving
• Business modeling and Advanced Excel skills are a must
• Genuine comfort using AI to build things. You already use Claude, ChatGPT, or similar in your daily work, you know how to prompt well, and you understand what an LLM is doing under the hood
• A bias toward action and a habit of keeping up with the AI landscape it shifts fast, and this role requires staying current
• Strong presentation and facilitation skills. You're comfortable in front of a room from front-line managers to the C-suite and can hold the conversation while a complex model is on screen
• A workflow mindset. You understand that AI is only powerful when workflow surrounding the tools change.
• Comfort with ambiguity. This role is still taking shape, and the right person will help define it
• Bonus: some scripting or coding experience (Python, VBA, or similar) you don't need to be a software engineer, but if you can write a script when one is needed, that goes a long way
• Backgrounds in engineering, finance, science, math, computer science, or economics are well-suited, though we have team members from all kinds of backgrounds and we love variety

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Willingness to travel 25-30%
• Eligibility to work in the US permanently without sponsorship

BTS is not a consultancy that bolted on an AI practice. We are a 1,200-person global performance transformation firm that has spent 40 years helping the world's leading companies turn strategy into results through their people. Our applied AI work is built on this foundation: technology only creates value when people change how they work.

Work with extraordinary clients. Our clients include over 40 of the world's 100 largest corporations across every major industry. You'll work on problems that matter at real scale.

Work near the frontier. BTS has growing relationships with leading AI labs. As the practice matures, there will likely be opportunities to co-build and co-deliver alongside them.

Freedom and responsibility. BTS is a flat organization where people lead projects and shape their own work from an early stage.

Hybrid by design. We feel that regularly working together in the office is the best situation for career development, so we're not hiring remote employees at this time. We do have a hybrid environment where you can work from home a few days a week.

Salary Information

Annual Salary Range: $75,000 - $90,000

• This range is for Business Analyst and Senior Business Analyst, and Consultant level roles. Starting salary is determined by experience and education/degree level.

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