New Study Reveals Most Important Skills For Students

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Research indicates Microsoft Office applications rank 3 of 20 top in demand skills for high-growth, high-pay careers. Top candidates for current and future jobs will be measured by capabilities and competencies, with 20 distinct skills bubbling up to the top in millions of high-growth, high-paying job postings, according to a white paper commissioned by Microsoft Corp. and released by IDC. The study provides insight into the skills students need for the top 60 high-growth, high-wage occupations that will account for 11.5 million new hires and 28 percent of job growth by 2020. Out of those skills, oral and written communication, detail orientation, and Microsoft Office proficiency top the list.
 
Yup... plaing to teach my kid to be an MS Office wizard (They still have MOUSE certs), and a second language such as Spanish or Chinese.
 
Honestly as an engineer I'm using the hell out of Excel for data analysis. So... yeah, we do need MS Office knowledge.
 
I work in applications development. An inability to use Word and Excel (or comparable analogs to those applications) would probably hobble a person in this type of position.
 
Its WYSIWYG, there's negligible learning curve for MS Office over free versions of Office. Kids don't need to know excel, they need to know the math that can be used in excel, they don't need to know Word, they need to learn how to write.

When kids need to learn "computers" they should be learning to build them and program them
 
What actually constitutes knowing how to use these programs? Because I know a lot of folks put down they know Word but probably can't do more than a bulleted list.
 
Steve said:
Out of those skills, oral and written communication, detail orientation, and Microsoft Office proficiency top the list.
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Why am I not surprised that a study commissioned by Microsoft touts their product? :rolleyes:

Any Joe can learn to use MS Office, but the other skills mentioned above are really what will help you succeed. In particular, the writing skill of many college graduates is appallingly bad.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Why Word?
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Primarily because of the documents that we receive from other people/groups. It's not particularly common for me to produce anything new using Word, but I think it's still good to know how to use the crap inside of it since there are occasions where I wind up having to add information to existing documents.

Even then, quite commonly, I just grab everything in the damn document and paste it into sublime because I want to kill someone's formatting with a dull spoon :rolleyes: then paste my shit back in when I'm done.
 
Excel seems to be the one most important skill for today's business analysts. If you can do pivot tables and formula's you can make in the low 100's without a degree.
 
cortexodus said:
Primarily because of the documents that we receive from other people/groups. It's not particularly common for me to produce anything new using Word, but I think it's still good to know how to use the crap inside of it since there are occasions where I wind up having to add information to existing documents.

Even then, quite commonly, I just grab everything in the damn document and paste it into sublime because I want to kill someone's formatting with a dull spoon :rolleyes: then paste my shit back in when I'm done.
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Ah, makes sense. I'd just as soon have people switch to LaTeX or FrameMaker than deal with the abortion that is Word, but good luck convincing an entire department or company they need to learn something new.
 
cortexodus said:
Primarily because of the documents that we receive from other people/groups. It's not particularly common for me to produce anything new using Word, but I think it's still good to know how to use the crap inside of it since there are occasions where I wind up having to add information to existing documents.

Even then, quite commonly, I just grab everything in the damn document and paste it into sublime because I want to kill someone's formatting with a dull spoon :rolleyes: then paste my shit back in when I'm done.
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Aaaaahhh, Word formatting! Get behind me Satan! Want some "MSO" in your markup much?
 
jpm100 said:
Its WYSIWYG, there's negligible learning curve for MS Office over free versions of Office. Kids don't need to know excel, they need to know the math that can be used in excel, they don't need to know Word, they need to learn how to write.

When kids need to learn "computers" they should be learning to build them and program them
Click to expand...

Having a good foundation is , well good but no offense who wants to retrain someone, when you can pick another candidate that can hit the ground running? Its just a waste of time. I know tons of people with great math back grounds who cant find their way around pivot tables to save their life, many of them don't even know pivot tables exist. You can watch someone bang away for hours or even days at a problem in excel because they don't know that pivot tables, and many data functions exists to make a 2 day job a 5 minute job. No amount of math basis anywhere in the world will over come the experience of knowing that something exists that can do the job for you already.

Ideally someone who is able to do these things will probably have a better resume anyway because they were able to do more work in less time.
 
Based on the majority of the people I do business with that have the highest paying jobs, I'd say the most important skill a student needs to learn is to throw a ball.
 
Excel is nice but holy hell you can easily fall into the trap of using it to do too much and for the wrong things. You want a long, cumbersome, manual, error prone, stab me in the eye process? Do all of your work in Excel.
 
MRAB54 said:
Excel is nice but holy hell you can easily fall into the trap of using it to do too much and for the wrong things. You want a long, cumbersome, manual, error prone, stab me in the eye process? Do all of your work in Excel.
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And throw some macros in there too! :rolleyes:
 
Wait, a study by microsoft reveals that the most important skills for students are microsoft programs? Gee, what a surprise :p

jpm100 said:
Its WYSIWYG, there's negligible learning curve for MS Office over free versions of Office. Kids don't need to know excel, they need to know the math that can be used in excel, they don't need to know Word, they need to learn how to write.

When kids need to learn "computers" they should be learning to build them and program them
Click to expand...

Yes, I agree with this. I have always abhorred the concept of teaching "programs" to people through their schooling. We should be teaching the fundamentals of what is going on first and foremost, and then secondly showing them they can do it by using X computer program.

The programs themselves are fickle and changeable, the underlying knowledge is what's important.

That's not to say we should remove all programs for them, obviously you teach them the concept and then say "ok, and now use this program to do it". But when the focus shifts from the concepts to the programs, I think you're heading down the wrong path.
 
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