"Want a job that promises a living wage and a good shot at a middle-class life? Learn Microsoft MSFT +0.13% Excel and other basic digital skills.
"That’s the conclusion of a report released Thursday by Burning Glass Technologies, a labor-market analysis firm that reviewed millions of job postings to understand which skills companies expect workers to have. The report focuses on middle-skill jobs – roles that require a high school diploma but not necessarily a college degree.
"The most commonly required skills are also the most basic ones: spreadsheet and word-processing software such as Microsoft Corp.’s Excel and Word, or the software from SAP SE SAP +0.14% and Oracle Corp.ORCL +0.44%, which large companies use to manage things like finances and human resources. (A worthwhile aside: Planet Money’s deep dive into the history of the spreadsheet.) Such expertise has become critical for office and administrative positions, retail supervisors, and store managers, among others.
“The report was commissioned by Capital One Financial Corp.COF +0.31%, which on Thursday also announced that it will invest $150 million over five years in efforts to train mostly low-income individuals in digital skills via partnerships with technology school General Assembly and Grovo Learning Inc., a website that offers short training videos focused on skills such as using Google GOOGL +0.54% Analytics and Microsoft Office.”
I read an article a few years back titled something like “why does business use Excel like a database?” The conclusion was because it’s something that business-savvy non-programmers are likely to know and they can quickly build into a solution for a problem that can’t justify a budget, a project manager, and the dreaded consultations with IT. It obviously doesn’t scale up beyond an Excel-savvy user or few, but sometimes that’s all you need. Get data, manipulate it as needed, perform calculations, draw conclusions.
Excel is also an excellent method to find opportunities in the gaps in companies with automated systems. If there’s a data source that’s .csv, some neglected web interface, or even some low-level database tables, Excel can read it and work some magic. It’s one of the easier ways for the average worker bee to do some useful number-crunching.
Been having this discussion with my 13-yr-old son, who is enjoying his 2nd year of Technology class in middle school. I tell him every business, big or small, is swimming in data. Mining that data can make/break profit margins, eek out efficiencies, and discover unforeseen patterns. ESmith is absolutely correct: most companies or departments can’t outsource data analysis on the fly and it takes an employee who knows the proprietary business model inside and out to ask the data the right questions. If you can run Excel (or the next step up, Access) and manipulate it with Visual Basic for Applications, when the choice comes down between you and someone who doesn’t, guess who’s getting the job or raise? If you run your own business, you’re using those skills to your own benefit.
I completed classes in Excel, Access, Powerpoint and even SQL, and I made “A”-level grades in all of them. Unfortunately, I rarely use most of this stuff, so I’ve forgotten how to do a lot of it, and I haven’t used any of them very much in a business environment outside of class.
It might be a useful project for a group to practice using office software. I say that, because I’m not quite at the point where I could do that right now, and I recognize that it would take a bit of time to set up. Otherwise, I would simply offer to lead such a group.
Agreed. Not typical. But if she has the knowledge, a person can make Excel sing and dance. And as an atypical Excel jock, she would make more money.
I got started because my office had datasets, some 10 years old, that were being loaded into a GPS system and data errors were popping up. VBA looked a lot like Fortran from my college engineering classes. Whenever I had time, I wrote QA/QC programs in Excel VBA to test the data’s validity. Boy, did my stock rocket in the office. Saved us a fortune and solved a huge GI/GO problem. From there, I went into programming & data analysis full time. Doubled my salary.