All companies need to evolve and push forward to stay competitive in today’s world. One way to lead the pack and promote profitability is by implementing development programs so that employees can continue to stay on top of the latest technologies and work as efficiently as possible. Continual training and advancement can also enable employers to protect one of their most valuable assets: their workforce.
Talented employees want to be challenged and strive hard to stay at the head of the pack. By providing them with the continuing education they need to be as effective as they wish to be, employers can improve retention, lowering employee turnover, as well as the risk of losing the most talented staff members to competitors. One program often included in these education training programs is Excel for Business.
What is Excel used for? Excel provides users with the ability to calculate, organize, and evaluate quantitative data, allowing managers and senior staff to have the information they need to make important decisions that can affect the company. By having employees trained in the advanced functions of Excel, they can better present their information all the way up to upper management. It is also a critical skill for employees hoping to climb to the top themselves.
There are benefits to learning advanced Excel for both employees and employers alike. Let’s take a deeper look at the advantages of Excel when companies include it as part of their routine employee training.
Benefits of Excel for Employees
Employees can benefit from advanced Excel training in many ways, from increasing value to learning better tools to improve their work output.
Sharpening Your Skill Set
Continuing to learn and hone your skill set is crucial to advance your career. Advanced Excel training focuses on a number of critical skills that can be utilized and valued in almost any position in a company. After training, you should be better able to:
- Visualize, manipulate, and evaluate the data.
- Create equations that can allow you to provide more data on vital company functions, such as workflow, project efficiency, financial projections and budgets, and even inventory levels and usage.
- Create an easy-to-read set of data that can be used by upper management to analyze current projects or situations in the company.
- Design spreadsheets that better organize data and provide a better picture of the information that is input.
- Read and comprehend spreadsheets and data from other departments, vendors, and customers.
- Provide answers and solutions to problems affecting the business by being able to interpret data at a more advanced level.
- Maintain, organize, and balance complex financial and inventory accounts.
- Create tracking systems for different departments and operations, including various workflow processes.
Advanced Microsoft Excel training will not only provide employers with higher-skilled employees but will also provide employees with tools that can help them work more effectively in their current positions and equip them to advance to higher-level positions.
Improving Your Efficiency and Productivity
Excel is a vital tool for speeding up productivity and allowing workers to be more efficient when dealing with large amounts of data and calculations. When you understand Excel at a more advanced level, you will have the ability to use its more sophisticated tools, which will allow you to complete your tasks and analyze your data more quickly. It will also allow you to keep team members up-to-date on data, which can streamline the workflow process.
Even better, knowing advanced Excel will allow you to better streamline your calculations. Repetitive calculations take time, especially when you have to double-check your work. With advanced Excel tools, you can create more complex calculations. Once your formula is written and you have programmed your set command, the program will perform all of the work to complete the calculations, freeing up your time for other tasks and ensuring that you have accurate data the first time around.
Making Yourself a More Valuable Member of the Company
Being a valuable employee not only will provide you with better job security, it opens up opportunities for advancement. The way to make yourself vital to the company is by being more efficient, better educated, and better skilled in your job functions. That is what training in advanced Excel can provide you. Employees should always find ways to increase their value to the company to avoid becoming replaceable by newer workers with a more advanced skill set. Learning and mastering new skills is crucial to stay on top of your game and set yourself up for greater security and advancement.
Making You Better at Organizing Data
A common go-to tool for collecting and organizing data is spreadsheets. And, in its simplest form, Excel is spreadsheet software. It allows you to carefully organize all of your data while providing you with the ability to sort the information in any way that you choose. Data in a raw state can be overwhelming and hard to analyze. With the advanced capabilities of Excel, you will be able to organize your information better, make calculations when necessary, and sort the information so that it can be appropriately analyzed and transferred to graphs or charts for better viewing.
It Can Make Your Job Easier
The more proficient at Excel you become, the more quickly you will be able to navigate the system. Microsoft Excel features several shortcuts that can enable you to work faster and even learn more complicated Excel strategies that can be used across the entire suite of Microsoft Office products. You also will be able to use the data in your Excel sheet across a variety of programs, reducing your need to re-enter information and allowing you to streamline your workflow better. The easier your job is, and the better equipped you are to handle it, the more likely you are to enjoy your work. In fact, there have been studies that show happier workers are 20% more productive than their unhappy counterparts. The easier your work is, the happier and more productive of an employee you will be.
Advantages of Advanced Excel for Employers
Not only can advanced Excel training and knowledge provide added benefits for your employees, but it can also provide numerous benefits for the company.
It Creates Greater Efficiency and Heightens Productivity
Yes, advanced training in Microsoft Excel can improve the efficiency and productivity of employees, as mentioned above, which will translate into greater efficiency and heightened productivity for the company. The more efficient your employee’s work, the quicker tasks, and projects will get done, allowing you to provide your customers and clients with better service and allowing more work to be output in a shorter period of time. Even if the benefits of advance Excel training shave a half-hour off of your employee’s time, when multiplied by the number of employees in the entire department or company, it can translate into a significant amount of extra staff-hours per week for other work.
It Allows You to Better Use an Asset You Have Already Acquired
Your software programs are assets of your company and ones that can be considered underutilized if the employees are not trained to maximize their use. Continued training on the tools and facets of Excel will allow you to get the most out of that asset as well as other assets that may not have been used to their maximum efficiency, such as inventory management systems. For example, if your employees can better streamline calculations and organize data, you can improve inventory management, making better use of those assets as well.
It Allows You to Grow Employee Knowledge With Little Expense and Effort
The employees in your company are already trained in the original Excel program, and implementing simple training programs that allow you to better use the program can be significantly less expensive than having to train new hires, who already have the knowledge of these advanced systems, in your company’s processes and procedures. Additionally, advanced training can be easy, usually taking a couple of weeks or less for employees who are already proficient at a more intermediate level. You also can save money by hiring an onsite trainer who can train a large portion of your workforce at once, instead of investing in outside training programs for each employee to take. It translates into a more educated and skilled staff at a minimal cost.
It Takes Stress Off of Your IT Support Team
When employees are not appropriately trained in all aspects of a software program, it can fall to your IT department to pick up the slack. Having IT staffers move workstation-to-workstation to train co-workers individually prevents them from focusing on more productive tasks, such as system upgrades, maintaining security, and hardware installs and maintenance.
Additionally, just because your IT department is able to help employees with the use of the software, it does not mean they are using it to its greatest capacity and producing the needed data and information needed for the products. Their talents lie with the technical side, and they may not understand the use or function of the information they are helping the employee to produce. If your employees are trained in advanced Excel, they will be able to handle their own data manipulations, saving the time they would normally wait on IT and producing better results.
It Can Help Your Talent Retention Efforts and Provide Employees With a More Satisfactory Job Experience
Valuable employees thrive learning new skills that can help them to not only excel in their current position but also move up the ranks. Failing to feed this need to learn can lower your employee’s happiness with their job and diminish their motivation to continue their career path with their current company. When you educate employees, you make them more valuable to the company, while reducing turnover and providing your most talented employees with a reason to stick around.
Thorough employee training is a critical component of advancing your workforce, improving productivity, and retaining a solid employee base. Whether you choose to invest in onsite training to bring your employees up-to-date on advanced Excel operation or enable them to pursue outside training opportunities, such as a master’s program featuring Advanced Excel coursework, continuing education for your employees is essential to continue to grow your company and stay ahead of competitors in your industry.
As they say, knowledge is power, and there is no better way to empower your workforce, improve their skills, and make them more valuable to the company than allowing them to use vital programs to maximum effectiveness. Keep your employees motivated, keep them learning, and keep them producing efficiently by using advanced Excel training to improve their day-to-day work.