Essential office skills that you are most probably neglecting

Now it’s a fact that working in an office to some may sound like just an excuse to sit down and talk on the phone all day while surfing Facebook, and while granted it’s not quite as labor intensive as say, being a contractor, it does have its own unique sets of stresses, strains and professional expectations of your work. One of the things you are expected to do in most offices is to give your 100% to the company and use every opportunity to innovate and keep up to date with the latest developments and products that are relevant to your industry or role in the organization, however, more focus on the latest and most cutting edge can sometimes mean lack of dedication to the bread-and-butter skills that you need daily.

For example, the less you use a program and focus on finding an alternative solution, you may be inadvertently excluding yourself form important updates in both the best practice when using them, to user interface updates and even to new features which could assist you. And that’s just in the world of software! All skills change over time, take a look at first aid Training, i9n the past 15 years and important lifesaving technique called the “recovery position” had been developed and taught in these courses, so how do you imagine somebody who hasn’t refreshed their course in that time to know about something which can potentially save lives? So, let’s take a look at some examples of basic skills you need to keep refreshed and up to date on.

Using CRM software

Now more and more in this day and age there has been a shift in focus from individuality and tailoring your solution to the exact requirements that your client or customer has, to efficiency within the workforce and maintaining that level of quality while at the same time being able to accurately display your hard work to both your superiors within the office and your clients who are paying you for this work. And the way that businesses these days keep track of time and effort put into their projects is through CRM or “project Management software”.  They vary in complexity and in specific applications and features but they all have the same task which is too accurately track, record and share work that is being completed by your company and be able to accurately display information like total amount of time worked, progress to completion for the project and are able to issue tasks to specific members of the team.

So, keeping up to date with developments and new features in this field will definitely give you the edge if your company ever decides to change their system over to a newer, better provider. After all if you can get a smoother interface with additional features for roughly the same price, then although some of your staff may struggle to adapt in the short term, for the decision maker it’s a no-brainer. And you will make yourself look great in front of your bosses for already knowing how half of the new features work.

Microsoft Excel

While most of us have a basic understanding of how to use Microsoft Excel and that most of us will use it to varying degrees in our professional lives (for making lists, keeping track of clients and pipelines etc.) We are constantly reminded by the program itself that there is so much more that this program can offer in our work if only we made the time to learn its functions and formulas in detail. However, unless you are particularly math savvy chances are that you will need some help when it comes to learning them and what they are used for.

 That’s why if you feel like you could drastically improve both your workflow and the amount of effort required to do simple calculations that you take a look in your local area at the various Excel training and workshops that are undoubtedly available and ready to help you through learning some of these more in depth and complicated features of what is, on the surface of things, a relatively simple spreadsheet program. And being able to display proficiency in Excel can not only help your work rate but also make you look like a bit of an expert in front of your co-workers when they need help with it.