I would be willing to take a shot at qualifying as “Expert” in Excel, even if it took me another week of heavy study. What tests carry actual weight with employers? I might throw in Word, too. I’m pretty much Intermediate both as it is.
There’s the Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) which was known in the past as MOUS. Higher than that are the Microsoft Office Specialist Expert and Microsoft Office Specialist Master certificates.
https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/mos-certification.aspx
I personally don’t trust any certifications for MS Office. I gauge such ability by field and demonstrated achievement and ability to talk about their work. For instance, I expect all attorneys to be expert in Word and everyone else to be average (myself included). Excel can have different specialties. I expect i-bankers to be the fastest and cleanest financial modelers, but people working in data intensive fields would be expected to have strong experience with VBA, and at minimum with pivot tables and vlookups.
Frankly, there’s too much capability in Excel to qualify anyone as an “expert” in a week’s worth of training. Anyone claiming to be an expert due to a few training courses is immediately discounted as a faker or at best inexperienced in my book (may have some basic familiarity but no applied experience). Someone who can intelligently talk about what they can and can’t do is much more credible.
I usually only expect general familiarity with MS Office and willingness to learn on the job (higher expectations for business undergrads). If I need a specialist, then the job description and interviews will filter for those skills.
P.S. I’m not saying don’t take training. It’s probably worthwhile, but don’t oversell or overstate the value of it in job interviews.
They’re too easy. I have them, and I am definitely not an Excel expert.
You expect all attorneys to be Word experts? I don’t get this. Certainly, lawyers should be able to edit a document. It’s as much a tool of the trade as a pencil was a few decades ago. But experts? I’m not sure what the operative definition of “expert” is here.
Absolutely true. As I said above, I have the MOS expert certification in Excel, and I am very far from an expert.
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Fair enough, I expect drafting attorneys to be able to whip up paragraphs, tables, bullets & sub-bullets and handle all of Word’s quirky styles faster than all other Word users. If they’re not experts I don’t know who would be (authors?).
Honestly I find Word to be very cumbersome and non-intuitive, but I’m a finance guy, so it’s not really my bailiwick. The attorneys I’ve worked with are able to spit out very polished docs relatively easily.
If we’re talking about the legal business, the people in the document processing departments of large law firms would be experts. They can whip up multi-chapter books and presentations with tons of graphics and embedded objects of various kinds, and put together huge SEC filings with hundreds of pages of financial information, imported from Excel (or other programs), write macros, prepare stuff to import into websites, and so on and so on. That’s expert. I’ve never met a lawyer who was an expert.
The question is, though, does anybody actually give a crap about these certs? I’m sure I could walk in and pick a few up, but should I?
It really depends on where you are trying to get a job. Some companies use certs the way that a lot of companies use bachelor’s degrees - no degree no job. Some don’t care for certs at all, while some (the best, imho) are willing to consider both certs as well as demonstrated knowledge and experience. E.g. if you have ten years of experience tuning, troubleshooting, and administering Oracle databases and I can reasonably verify your experience by calling previous employers, an Oracle cert is puffery. If you are just out of school or have marginal experience and need to “get your foot in the door”, a cert can prove that you probably aren’t a complete dumbshit and can probably be trained to do something.
Now, if your experience is in Oracle but you have also picked up some non-Oracle certs, that demonstrates some level of cross-trainability.
I don’t actually know. Oddly, my firm doesn’t care about them when they’re hiring, but insists that employees get them (where relevant) after they’re hired. Can’t say I see the point, but that’s why I got the whole MS Office suite of certs (all expert), and how I know that an Expert or Master cert doesn’t prove that you’re an expert.
There might be some commitment from someone high-level to “on-going professional development for our valued team members” or suchlike. Some certs can be a relatively pain-free and cheap way to meet that goal/tick that box.
I’m trying to change industries (and hopefully have a way in somewhere but have been put on ice for months). Perhaps that’s a situation where it does make sense? My current employer probably wouldn’t pay for it though.