Why don't recent grads know how to use excel?

likehelpfulfunny
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There are extremes. While some struggle with excel and PowerPoint, others (liberal arts, and business) can code in C#, Python, SQL, Solidity, and leverage PowerBI effectively.

Over the years, after being frustrated of teaching basics, I find myself building training decks across various disciplines I consider 101. Helps me articulate and consistently deliver minimum quality training to bring up my analysts / associates.

Yet if a certain skill is critical, run that as part of your interview process. Had various surprises when I baked such items into a structured interview, an engineer had more appreciation of bank capital than many of my full time junior staff, a history major understood the nuance of correlated risk through reading “too-big-to-fail”.

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I thought that I was a try hard for keeping a running list of excel short cuts / formula explanations etc to share with my junior analysts

You sound dope af 😂 manager goals

Liberal arts college grad here - the only reason I was semi proficient at excel out of undergrad is because I was a TA and had to help the professor track class grades.
Context is key. A class on how to use excel isn't worth as much as having to figure out how to use excel to make your life easier for actual work.

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Proficiently? Because none of their courses teach you that. Honestly the extent to which students use Excel is =sum()

likefunnysmart

Exactly.

helpful

It’s too psychologically triggering to learn

likefunny

😎

Lol, we're too busy with our liberal arts projects

likefunny

Lol amen to that. I wish I had actually learned how to use excel in college but nope I learned a bunch of useless things that I didn’t even remember

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Never understood why this was not taught as a required course in B School

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Excel, financial modelling, stats all required modules for my double degree.

Excel is old tech. I’ve dealt with new grads and they know Python, etc. more.

Their used to more advanced tech than Excel.

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I believe is not about boomers or not, isn't that they prefer Excel, the reality is that a big part of the world actually "runs in Excel"

Is great to know other tech but excel is needed.

Because the education system is broken. From tuition fees to curriculum. Broken.

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Too busy learning Altryx idk lol

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Most everything I learned about Excel was in high school or on the job. None in college—undergrad or masters.

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Cause some of us are liberal art majors…you hired us for our critical thinking skills/thinking.

Excel is something I think most of us expect to learn on the job. After 6 months, I’ve seen my improvise though, quite exponential and I’m really proud of it

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Improvements*

Honestly, I'm a recent undergrad and I (probably) know more Excel than you

Maybe your sample is just biased

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Well drop some knowledge. Describe the complex situation when you got data and what did you do to resolve?

I had a professor in my undergraduate (grad. 2017) who wanted to drill us in Excel and I also had to take a course on it. I’m not sure why new grads don’t learn it. I had excel experience since high school. I thought it would be more commonly taught

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I’m shocked at how slowly they pick it up too. I spent the better part of 3 days showing an associate different functions/uses and he didn’t get it. I had to keep showing him over and over again.

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A diploma doesn’t necessarily mean a person is smart. Simply that they took classes and scored high enough to pass tests. I think people forget that a piece of paper doesn’t always equal intelligence. Also depending on the professor, I’ve sent kids sky’s through classes clueless.

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Truth: Because most of their professors don’t know how to use it, thus teach it.

I’m married to a bio professor at a nationally ranked uni. The other day one of her colleagues was going to analyze a 4000 line data set by printing it out, highlighting relevant rows and manually counting. She suggested sending it to me and seeing if I knew of a faster way… (yes, I did)

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Because college doesn't teach you real life in the market skills.

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Because unless you are signed up for an Office class it’s not taught. Even PowerPoint which while the standard in business is usurped by applications like Prezi on the web. I was first exposed to Excel in Middle School but didn’t ever touch it again until my first office job. When I did go back to school and minored in business I had one IT class that really only taught you to do sum() and make charts. It was a 1 credit class who is a top 50 b-school. There are just so many projects and readings that have to get done there isn’t time or a reason to learn Excel. I’ve learned more about Excel on the job than I ever did in a classroom.

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Because no one has published a $500 excel textbook

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I was an engineering major. Didn’t learn Excel in college but could code. Still can’t stand how clunky Excel is for analytics…

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Grads in Marketing? Day are scared of too much information. 😅

funny

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