J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

How To Be Employable

Here's some advice: You will always be employable if you know how to do this

One recruitment professional claims to have identified the secret of eternal employability in financial services: advanced Excel skills.

“There is always steady demand for people with advanced Excel,” says Dominic Connor at P&D Quant Recruitment. “It is an excellent safety net for when it hits the pan.”

Using Excel to ensure employability means familiarising yourself with pivot tables, VBA, importing and exporting data from SQL servers and more complex elements like DDE (dynamic data exchange strings).

And this:

The great joy of all this is that it’s easy to learn, argues Connor. “All you need to do is to buy a book by Walkenbach and work your way through from beginning to end,” he suggests, “The joy of Excel is that everyone knows how to do it, but not many people know how to do it properly.”

- Reader Comments -

Following are comments in response to this item.
The most recent comment is at the bottom.

1. By Rob Bruce. Comment posted 15 November, 2011 3:30pm

   Not only this, but if you make your speadsheets sufficiently impenetrable, you'll be literally irreplaceable: They won't ever dare get rid of you. Until your wizardry brings the whole company crashing down, that is.
2. By Mike Woodhouse. Comment posted 16 November, 2011 3:31am

   For heaven's sake, don't spread this around - you'll make it harder for the Excel insiders who already know!
   
   In general, I've found that almost everyone is impressed to a quite inappropriate degree if you (a) can use array formulae to condense oceans of Excel real-estate (b) know what a class is and how to use one in VBA and (c) can customize the Excel interface - in any way at all. All three together and you should never be out of work for long.
3. By Alex. Comment posted 20 November, 2011 12:01am

   Really?I'm not sure if someone is good at spreadsheet then he will not be got rid of.
4. By Doug Glancy. Comment posted 11 February, 2012 3:58pm

   "All you need to do is to buy a book by Walkenbach and work your way through from beginning to end." I said virtually the same thing last week in response to somebody asking about the best Excel tutorial websites. There are many great Excel sites out there, but I don't know of any that pack the punch of one of those 800-page babies.