No one takes a typing class in high school anymore. Maybethey should; or, more likely, they should take courses that teach thefundamentals of using tools that many people use every day. Tools that, in manycases, they use very inefficiently.
Excel, for instance: Filtered,a London-based online training company, recently published research showingthat, even among accounting professionals, skilled use of Excel is theexception rather than the norm. Financial professionals answered almost half ofthe test questions incorrectly; other professionals who use Excel dailyaveraged only 28 percent correct answers.
Word processing tools like Microsoft Word and presentationtools, such as MS PowerPoint, are other commonly (mis)used tools. “We are in this stuff all thetime and assume people know how to use things. They often don’t,” said GuildMaster and learning architect Jean Marrapodi.
In a recent interview, Marrapodi described knowledge gapsamong adult learners in these essential tools. “You can assume that they knowcertain elements of navigating a website, or saving a document, cut and copy.But that’s not necessarily true,” she said. “In the Millennial world inparticular, we have expectations that they know how to use the software—Wordand Excel and PowerPoint and all that—because they’re techno-literate intheory. In reality, they are mostly self-taught on those things. You have somehigh schools and colleges that prepare students, but there is a greatassumption, and there’s a gap that’s there.
“When I was teaching at the college level, I would begrading papers, and the students were using their computer like a typewriter:They would go space, space, space, space, space to put a paragraph in, theydidn’t know about page breaks, and they didn’t know a lot of things—but theydidn’t know that they didn’t know. That’s how they thought it worked.”
When those students graduate and begin working, theircorporate employers might assume that they know how to use MS Office and othercommon workplace software; the students-turned-employees might also believethat they do. More experienced employees who’ve been using these tools foryears also believe that their knowledge is sound. But how many of them usespaces instead of tabs, or blank lines instead of paragraph spacing? How manycopy and paste repeating elements on PowerPoint slides because they don’t knowhow to use slide masters? Even worse, Marrapodi reports “too many”presentations on plain white screens from students who “never found thetemplate functionality.”
How many other kludgy workarounds are in common use, simply becauseemployees don’t know the tools well enough to perform tasks efficiently? Commonerrors Marrapodi reports include:
- Using the space bar to manually center text,rather than using a tab or center alignment
- Using Excel to create a table effect (where aWord table would be more appropriate)
- Creating a “spreadsheet” in Excel, butperforming calculations on an adding machine or calculator and typing in the results,rather than using formulas and letting Excel, a powerful tool, do its job
Manually formatting and reformatting the text in a singledocument is not a big deal; but an employee who creates dozens of similardocuments a month could save a significant amount of time, not to mentionachieving a more consistent and therefore more professional look, if he knewhow to use templates and styles.
It can be humbling to test one’s skills. Melanie Kim, astaffing consultant at AppleOne, deals with many applicants for office jobs.She tells new applicants that the tests are by the book; applicants’ scoresreflect the process followed, not the end results. “The majority of ourcandidates are at an intermediate proficiency with the programs, and they havea very good grasp of the functions that are really required for theirday-to-day job,” Kim said. But, she added, “The global average for our tests isin the 73 percent range, and you can think of this as the C average. There aresome more senior employees that will know 80 to 90 percent of the functions,and some true experts that will get 100 percent on the tests. Many people arelargely self-taught on the programs, and so they may not be aware of moreadvanced functions.”
The good news is, there is a simple, low-cost fix for thisproblem: eLearning. While testing employees or requiring training might be tooheavy-handed, offering ways for—or even encouraging—employees to “brush up” on theirskills or learn shortcuts could dramatically improve learners’ proficiency. Framingthe courses as optional ways to become power users can keep learners from feelingpressured; in some companies, offering incentives or encouraging employees toteach one another might be successful strategies.
A short online course (there are many free ones) can teach“power shortcuts” or focus on skills needed for specific tasks: using columnsand tables, for example. Encourage learners to exploit the power of visuallearning by honing their PowerPoint or Prezi skills. The small amount of timethat employees spend on training could pay off exponentially in time saved ondaily tasks—and in reduced frustration.
