Top 5 Reasons Why Organizations Should Invest in Excel Training
Across the business landscape, Microsoft Excel remains the mainstay for tracking data, budgets, and managing many other business processes. The spreadsheet application is the workhorse of the commercial world: Roughly 83% of Fortune 500s use the Microsoft Office 365 suite, which includes Excel, and a third of small- to mid-sized businesses depend on Excel to keep their operations humming.
If your business leverages the power of Excel, you should be offering Excel training to your employees. Here are five reasons why:
#1: Training ensures you can make the most of Excel’s powerful capabilities
Businesses turn to Excel because it’s powerful and user friendly. The data management tool allows users to perform advanced calculations and create graphical representations of data. Yet half of all workers say they’ve never been trained to use it.
Skilled users can easily perform complex calculations and manage large data sets. With proper training, real-time collaboration makes everyone more productive, enabling multiple users to work on the same spreadsheet simultaneously. Consistent training ensures that everyone using Excel within the organization can take maximum advantage of these powerful capabilities.
#2: Mastering Excel can enhance your teams’ efficiency
Workers spend 43 percent of their time on tasks like building worksheets and creating presentations, the Wall Street Journal reports. When your employees master Excel, they become inherently more efficient: performing calculations, analyzing data, and creating graphic visualizations of their outputs quickly and easily.
When you give workers training on the skills they need to streamline these data management tasks, it empowers them to make better, more productive use of their working hours. Efficient data handling means they have more time to focus on higher-level work, the activities that add real value to the organization.
#3: Excel training helps boost problem-solving skills
More than 60 percent of employers say they want workers with problem-solving skills, Forbes reports. As workers train on Excel, they will build up those skills. As they learn to navigate Excel’s functions and formulas, they’ll be breaking down complex problems into manageable components, building their logical thinking and analytical reasoning abilities.
Through a deeper understanding of data manipulation techniques, they’ll learn to craft efficient solutions to business problems. By troubleshooting errors in formulas, they’ll build critical thinking skills. Overall, Excel proficiency will help them to identify patterns and anticipate outcomes. All these are valuable skills — the kinds of skills businesses need.
#4: Level setting allows everyone to speak the same language and collaborate more easily
If Excel is a mainstay in your organization, you want everyone using it in the same way. With everyone “speaking the same language” in Excel, you can ensure consistent data handling and drive more seamless and accurate communication — between individuals, and across teams. Consistent training ensures uniformity in how your team uses Excel.
With a shared set of skills, team members can work together more efficiently as they look to solve business problems. Moreover, standardized training can help to cultivate a common understanding of Excel’s more advanced features, for improved productivity and problem-solving.
#5: Training shows your commitment to employees’ personal and professional development
Some 33 percent of businesses say they are struggling with retention, according to a recent SCORE survey. Training can make a big difference: 45 percent of workers say that if their employers offered more training, they’d be more likely to stay at their current jobs, according to consulting firm Devlin Peck.
When you invest in building Excel skills, you are showing a commitment to personal and professional development. Given Excel’s wide use across diverse businesses, proficiency with the software is an almost-universally applicable skill, one that can enhance productivity and help drive success across a variety of roles and industries.
With Excel training, you’re not only helping people to succeed in their current roles. You’re also helping them to build their future careers. That’s the kind of commitment that makes people want to stay.
If your business runs on Excel, you want to get maximum value from this powerful software. With the right training from Emory Continuing Education, you’ll ensure employees are using Excel to drive data-informed decision making, and you’ll strengthen their ability to collaborate effectively over the data sources that help drive business success. We invite you to consider our multiple Excel training options for your work teams – view available training.