Microsoft Excel is a common application. You may have used it on the job or for school, but chances are that you only used it for its most basic uses.
However, Excel skills are more important than ever. And those who know how to tap into Excel are in a better position to find a better paying job. Even simply knowing how to convert PDF to Excel can increase your chances.
NovelAspect.com, a cloud hosting firm, conducted research on Indeed.com job listings from 50 of the most populous cities in US and looked at 200+ business platforms. Their goal was to determine the most in-demand software skills on the market.
And guess what? Microsoft Excel skills came out on top.
So if you’re now interested in bumping up your spreadsheet skills for a better paying job, then the next question to anticipate on your way up is where can you get your foot in the door?
We scrounged up a list of jobs (in no particular order) that make use of Excel to give you a head start.
Financial Analysts
Financial Analysts are expected to know MS Excel inside out. This is because they’re expected to make conclusions and recommendations based on financial data. Researching, consolidating, and analyzing numerical data is part of what they do to help companies make informed decisions.
As you can imagine, the mandatory skills and tools for financial analysts include the spreadsheet skills to show sales and direct costs or annual revenues and spending, for example. This is a demand that’s even felt by Wall Street analysts who need to use Excel to make daily investment decisions.
Administrative Assistants
A job search for Administrative Assistants with Microsoft Excel skills on Indeed.com pulls up 6,157 job postings across the US, which proves that Microsoft Excel is certainly part of the daily routine of an administrative assistant.
Administrative Assistants perform a number of tasks such as minor bookkeeping, generating reports, creating client databases, organizing document systems, and maintaining computer records–all of which involve Excel to a certain extent.
Retail Store Managers
A Retail Store Manager is in charge of maintaining and running the daily operations of a store. Though they’re responsible for creating store policies, overseeing and leading staff, and monitoring inventory, retail managers are also responsible for maximizing profits. As such, they analyze consumer and sales trends, prepare annual budgets and schedule expenditures. And Excel is natural tool of choice.
Project Managers
A Project Manager has to stay on top of everything to ensure that everything stays on track. From working with third party vendors and allocating resources to managing employees and creating documents, project managers need to navigate through all the information they need.
While there are tools that exist for more complex projects, project managers can use Excel while working with smaller businesses to streamline daily operations, manage financial records, sort out vendor lists, generate reports, and create gantt charts.
Business Analysts
A Business Analyst is someone who analyzes an organization or business, documents its processes or systems, and assesses the business, identifying areas and solutions aimed at maximizing the value of a company. And this requires keeping track of a ton of data and being able to analyze it. That’s where spreadsheets step in as one of the best analytical tools for business analysis according to a few professionals on Quora.
Data Journalists
Data Journalists nowadays need to work with huge amounts of data in order to integrate credible information into their stories. Before they resort to larger database tools, their main tool is Excel, which they use to analyze data on the information they receive. An Excel spreadsheet is always the starting point for journalists with or without in-depth coding or high-level database skills.
Accountants
This list wouldn’t be complete if Accountants weren’t on this list. True, they deal with specialized accounting software like QuickBooks, but accountants must be proficient with Excel. This includes tasks such as auditing, formatting, using formulas to filter out different values and sums, and more. To ensure that the numbers add up, they need to analyze them.
Start taking your career up a notch. You can search on professional job boards such as Glassdoor or Indeed.com. There are also Upwork.com and Guru.com for the freelancing digital nomad. And of course, there’s LinkedIn for connecting with knowledgeable professionals.
Do you use Excel in your job? Share your MS Excel work experiences with us.