A business analyst is a professional that helps their employer design, deliver, and support the solutions that the organization needs.

Organizations are constantly evolving. This constant evolution requires the organization to regularly assess its current operations, and make investments into solutions that will help them achieve the next stage of their evolution.

A business analyst is the professional that helps the organization understand their current situations, design & deliver new solutions, and to help maintain those solutions on an ongoing basis.

Business analysts carry out specific activities and produce specific deliverables throughout the solution delivery and solution maintenance processes to help their organizations with this mandate.

These activities often include discovery, stakeholder analysis, solutioning, work planning, and elaboration. 

The deliverables often include include functional scope statements, business requirements, functional specifications, change requests, enhancement requests, and process maps.

As an aspiring business analyst, you should understand the solution delivery & maintenance processes of your organization and figure out how you can begin performing the activities, and producing the deliverables that are required to facilitate those processes.