Looking for a new job and many of the job listings ask that applicants have knowledge of Microsoft Outlook.
I have never used Outlook at any job I’ve had and I’ve never used it personally either, but I usually just ignore this detail and send a resume anyway.
Is prior knowledge of Outlook more important than I think it is?
As someone who has never used it, my little informed understanding is that it is an e-mail application. When the job says they want someone who has knowledge of Outlook I basically translate it as “Uh …you know what e-mail is, right? We’re definitely gonna need you to understand the concept of e-mail.” Well, I am very experienced in both sending and receiving e-mails and I’ve never started up a new e-mail service without finding it entirely intuitive and self-explanatory.
Is my lack of experience with it as little a deal as I think it is?
For those of you who use Outlook at work, if you hired someone new then found out that that person had no prior knowledge of Outlook, would that actually be a training nightmare that you had hoped to avoid by asking for it in your original Craiglist posting?
Not everyone finds Outlook intuitive because it’s not web based like Gmail or whatever.
(Unless they mean the online version, but generally they mean the program.)
If you have Office, why not just try it out? Try to set up your email, send an email, and read one. If you can do that, you’re doing pretty well and can safely say you know Outlook.
Lots of workplaces use Office for more than sending and receiving email. It is also used as a calendar, to schedule meetings with internal and external stakeholders, to keep your address book/contacts straight, and it also has a Task function.
Most of these uses can be easily figured out if you’re even slightly computer savvy. I’d suggest watching a couple of training videos if you don’t have access to Outlook to try it out.
It does a little bit more than just e-mail in that there is also a calender and a contact lists.
I think it would depend on the job. If its just a basic paper pushing job then they probably just want you to be able to read your e-mails, and look at your calendar. So you should be able to pick it up in a half hour or so.
If its more of an administrative assistant job in a large organization, then you may be expected to do more technical things such as set up mailing lists, send emails that update everyone’s calendar, and you may want to familiarize yourself with it more before going into the interview.
It also includes a calendar in which you can schedule meetings with other people using Outlook (and the other people can accept or reject those meeting requests), a task manager and I think a few other things (haven’t used it for several years, so my memory is getting fuzzy). You’ll probably need to quickly figure out how to schedule meetings; I made significant use of that back when I was working.
If you can use other programs in Office, like Excel, or another similar mail program, and if I felt you could catch on intuitively, I would hire you. For all practical purposes, it’s just another MS application for which most users only need to know a few basic functions to get started. I think your other skills and knowledge would be much more important.
As others have said - yes, it’s an email client, but it’s quite a lot else too - the calendar has a multitude of features (meeting requests, appointments, room and resource booking, recurrence) - but even the email side isn’t just email - you can send emails with voting buttons on them - flag emails as ‘To Do’ tasks, etc.
Most of that is pretty intuitive though. Unless it’s a job for someone whose primary workload will be organising meetings and communicating via email, they may not be looking for someone with an advanced knowledge of all the detailed features.
This. I’ve used Outlook in most programming jobs I’ve held. You can learn how to set up meetings in an afternoon of reading documentation and trying it out. That brings you nearly as far as you really need to be for one of these jobs. The rest you can pick up as needed right on the job (e.g. you can just google “How to put recurring meeting on someone else’s calendar in outlook” at your leisure).
If you’re going to be doing administrative work, they may want you to know more about setting up users and mailing lists and integrating Outlook with other stuff.
Outlook is a pain in the ass, and I don’t find it very intuitive at all, especially when you get to the functions other than email. (Seriously, if you want to search for a contact, why is it ctrl-e instead of ctrl-f like for every other “find” function in the known universe?)
That said, it’s not hard to learn, especially if you pick up applications quickly and are willing to find most of your own help when you need it.
Don’t hesitate to apply for jobs where it’s listed. I can’t imagine it would be a deal-breaker in the vast majority of cases.
But - don’t lie and say you know it if you don’t. Depending on the position, it could get obvious real fast. Best case is to get some measure of experience with it as suggested so at least you can say “I have used it but I’m not an expert” or something like that.
So let me see, I’m interviewing for a role that might need someone to organise meetings, and ensure coordination across departments, and someone who does this needs to be pretty diligent and trustworthy.
Some of those interactions might well require the verification of receipt, and traceability, and if something goes wrong, I need, as a manager to find out what and where to prevent a reoccurrence, and there is also the other aspect that emails can be used in legal proceedings.
As a manager I also may not be too happy if material is circulated to the wrong recipients, this can happen very easily when you have to communicate between groups of involved parties, its so easy to ‘reply to all’ or forget to blind copy documents.
Here we have someone saying that they hope to apply for a post that specifically requires the operative to be familiar with outlook, and that person is deciding whether or not to lie and try to get by afterwards.
If it would take less than an hour or two to train somebody who had never seen a particular app, that app should not be listed as a requirement. This is a major peeve of mine, when they say you need, say, two years experience with Remedy, or MS Office. Anybody who takes two YEARS to learn how to use these apps? You don’t want them working for you. Also, if they have to say Required: MS Office (Word, Excel). How the hell does somebody learn how to use MS Office without realizing that it’s mostly Word and Excel? “Gosh, when you said MS Office, I thought you meant InfoPath Designer!” And also again, how does anybody get all the rest of the requirements on the list without learning how to use a word processor? If you’ve got the rest of the requirements, can’t we all just assume you know how to use Word and Excel? Christ.
I agree with casdave; if I’m hiring a new administrative assistant and the job calls for the person to manage calendars for others and for conference rooms, to manage their correspondence and to do other things in Outlook, I’d expect them to be able to do this the first day. Not to have them repeatedly come to me, another admin or to IT to ask multiple questions about stupid shit the new hire should already have known.
The number of people who think they “know Word”, but come in here asking what the heck a section break is and how did they get one in their document and how come Word is so buggy as to have these things continues to astound.
Ditto Excel and folks asking for trivial assistance with things like formatting cells or understanding the difference between a cell which is empty, contains a space character, and contains the number zero.
Not to mention the incompetent help often offered by well-meaning but equally clueless posters.
My complaint is with job ads that don’t distinguish between:
You need Word skills sufficient to make a one-page sign saying “Please clean the microwave after use; you’re sub[/sub] Mom doesn’t work here!1!”
versus
the skills necessary to compile and maintain multiple hundred-page docs with tables of contents, consistent formatting, embedded pictures and spreadsheets, footnotes, etc.
versus
All the above, plus create templates and macros.
Nope: all those are advertised as “2 years experience with Word.” or “Word expert.” If you’ve ever seen the horrors created by somebody with skillset #1 trying to do skillset #2’s job you’ll understand what I mean. Not to mention the insane waste of time as skillset #1 spends hours doing something badly that skillset #2 would do with 3 mouse-clicks.
Excel skills are even worse since they cover a much wider range.
Some people use it just as a grid-oriented word processor. In fact Microsoft’s own use case studies show that’s about 30% of all end-user hours. The folks who ran those studies were almost crying when it was over. I’ve met them.
At the other end are the folks who use it as a linear programming solver engine.
But employers ask for “Excel skills” and that’s about it. Friggin’ morons.
In case you wondered, why yes, you did bump one of my pet peeves.
Our company switched from using a program called Groupwise for email to MS Outlook several years ago, and I don’t think anyone had any real trouble learning how to use Outlook. If you’ve used a similar e-mail/scheduling program, then you’ll probably pick up Outlook right away. In fact, I think it’s one of the few positive software switches my company has ever seen.
Switching the phone system to Microsoft Lync, on the other hand, has been pretty much terrible, and it took people months to figure out how to do such basic things as transfer calls.
If the job listing lists Outlook as one of a bunch of other MS Office programs, you shouldn’t be very concerned. If it is singled out, you should be a whole lot more concerned that that you’re not qualified. Happily, they will decide if you’re qualified, not you.
It wouldn’t matter to me. If I advertised a job where you needed Outlook skills and, rather than acquiring them, you just pretended to have them you would fail the practical test and we would say good bye immediately. At the moment we do this with Excel users. They get 15 minutes to do a 10 minute task and if they are like you, just pretending to be users, they don’t get it done. They don’t even have to be expert users, just know enough to get around and answer a few questions. We got sick of pretend users years ago.
The question seems weird to me. I generally assume if you have worked in an office or gone to school within the past 20 years, you have a basic understanding of writing a document in Word, creating a simple spreadsheet in Excel and sending and receiving email and using the calendar in Outlook.
