5 Reasons You Need to Learn Microsoft Excel
If you’ve never used Microsoft Excel or you haven’t used it in a while, learning it now could be one of the best ways to spend some of your time. Having Excel skills on your resume can be a significant boost to your career, and knowing Excel can also help you in your personal life.
In this article, we’ll look at five ways Excel can improve your life:
- Increase Your Earning Potential
- Change Your Career
- Land That Promotion
- Get Remote Work
- Manage Your Own Data
Increase Your Earning Potential
Any skills you can learn that are in demand will improve your chances of increasing your earnings. There are two sides to how understanding how to use Excel can increase your income.
More Opportunities
Having more skills makes more opportunities available to you. I’m sure you’ve heard of the concept of supply and demand. We usually use this term when we think about physical products or services. But the concept can also be applied to skills and opportunities. Continually increasing your skills and ensuring that those skills are in demand will make more opportunities available. The more skills you have, the better paying these opportunities will be.
Increased Productivity
Knowing shortcuts and using Excel properly can help you get things done more quickly when using Excel. Many people know how to use Excel, but they don’t know all the shortcuts and ways to improve their Excel usage. Increasing your Excel knowledge will help you in this area. If your productivity will Excel increases, you will be able to take on more at work and will be able to prove how valuable you are to your organization.
Change Your Career
It’s estimated that approximately 90% of companies use Microsoft Excel. They use Excel to manage and organize many parts of their operations. Also, they may use Excel to communicate critical details about how they are helping their clients or customers.
Having Excel skills can help you to move into a career that you want to pursue. A recent search on LinkedIn returned over 294,000 thousand results for jobs that mentioned Microsoft Excel just in the United States!
While most businesses use Microsoft Excel, many career categories require Microsoft Excel skills. So, if you want to move to any of these careers, you need to up your level of Excel experience.
Here are some of the top careers that expect you to have Excel skills:
- Administrative Assistant
- Accountant
- Auditor
- Business Analyst
- Cost Estimator
- Data Journalist
- Educator
- Financial Analyst
- Information Clerk
- Marketer
- Project Manager
- Retail Manager
Land That Promotion
If you want to stay with your current employer but want to increase your potential to move up in the company, Microsoft Excel skills can help you do just that. You already have a proven track record of being a valued employee, so the more skills you can learn, the better your chances of getting promoted (and receiving a pay increase).
When you show that you are willing to put in the work to gain new skills, you will show that you are a self-starter who continually improves yourself. Employers love to see this type of growth in their employees.
Get Remote Work
With the number of remote work opportunities currently available, having computer and Excel skills can increase your possibility of landing a remote gig. These skills may also help you create your own remote work.
And, if you do start working remotely, you may need a way of tracking your time, income, and more. Excel can help you do that by giving you a place to capture your information and turn it into valuable data in the form of pivot tables or charts.
Manage Your Own Data
When you think of Excel, you may think it’s basically used to work with financial data. While Excel’s strong suit is working with numbers and calculations, it can manage and track many data types.
One of the best ways to learn a skill is to practice using it. You can practice with Excel by using it to track some of your personal information. I use Excel to track my checking and savings accounts, 401(k)-account status, the training I’m taking, books I’m reading, details of students of my courses, and much more.
Conclusion
Learning Microsoft Excel can be one of the best decisions you make for your career. Although Excel is an extensive program, it’s easy to start learning it. Just take it one step at a time and continually build on your knowledge of the program. And, as an added bonus, when you learn Excel, you’ll have a lot of the skills you need to use Google Sheets (Google’s version of Excel).
Do you want to learn Excel or brush up on your Excel skills? Check out my Microsoft Excel: Quick Start course to learn the essential Excel skills you need to boost your career and earning potential.