Adding Advanced Excel skills to your C.V. can help land that next big job, but what are Advanced Excel skills, how do we get officially accredited, and how can we use them to prove our IT skills?
What are Advanced Excel Skills?
Advanced Excel skills show mastery over the Microsoft program Excel – confident use of macros, PivotTables, advanced charting, and conditional formatting. Advanced skills go beyond Intermediate Excel training, introducing more complex tools for manipulating data within Excel, including but not limited to: –
- Macros – these are recorded tasks that you can instruct Excel to do repeatedly, or until a condition is met. Macros can assist in marking overdue accounts weekly, monthly, or annually,
- PivotTables – these allow you to extract significance from a large data set, which assists with finding data trends within a collection of raw data.
- Advanced Charting – the Advanced Charting function allows you to create charts from multiple data sets, allowing for advanced extrapolation and data analysis.
- Conditional formatting – allows you to create a ruleset and sort data by that ruleset, which can be expanded on to filter data by multiple data subsets.
How do I get accredited?
To be able to add Advanced Excel skills to your CV, it would be wise to begin by searching for a Microsoft Academy, which offers a range of Excel training courses. Many people prefer live classroom courses, but I recommend online courses. This is because too many people attend one-day excel courses and all is well, but when you don’t practice you forget. the online option gives you the ability to return to the course content after taking the training. Microsoft Academies are increasingly offering more sophisticated online training that can test you and give real-life examples. It doesn’t matter if you’re just trying to dust off your C.V. or training your team to get ahead of the competition.
Specialised courses also exist for those looking for a more extensive course to cover all aspects of Advanced Excel. Some training companies will offer 2 Day Advanced Excel courses for £400-600 which include Creating Macros, Collaborating with Others, Creating PivotTables, PivotCharts and Slicers, Array Functions, Advanced Lookup and Reference Functions, Analysing Data, Data Validation and Importing/Exporting Data. However, online courses are available for less than £100.
Microsoft Office Specialist
For those looking to break into the IT industry, becoming an officially accredited Microsoft Office Specialist will boost your potential earnings by up to 9% and more. To begin earning more on your next job, begin by finding the MOS Study Guide, available from all major bookstores with a paperless Kindle version also available for eBooks. Once you have completed the Microsoft Office Specialist Certification, you can apply for the MOS Expert and Master certifications, giving you a median salary that is £5,200 higher than an applicant with only a bachelor’s degree.
Getting an Advanced Excel accreditation will kickstart your career into overdrive, even if you don’t work in the IT industry. Whether you are currently seeking employment, looking for a better position internally or searching for better prospects, an Advanced Excel accreditation will make you stand out from the crowd. You can get Accredited Excel Courses at Advanced Excel Courses.