My excel skills suck and it’s costing me job opportunities
For the last four years I have in many ways fulfilled the role of an operations manager while working for the British national health service: I have idenfitied issues with processes, written proposals, and led on embedding improvements. I have excelled at it and really enjoyed it too.
However, for the problems that requiered data analysis this was always pretty straightforward: 4 or 5 columns and less than 100 rows of clean data. If this was ever more than that, there was a data analyst I could work with to get the information I needed.
I have applied to jobs in operations management but I lack the excel pivot data, power pivot/power BI experience to secure them. One of them sent a case study with several large data sets, and it has defeated me purely on the excel skills, otherwise I have no doubt I would have secured the role.
How essential are excel skills to operational management in people’s experience? Would you recommend investing in developing my skills with excel before applying to more operation roles?
Thank you!
Edit to clear up a point that keeps coming up in comments:
I have spent around 3 days self-learning through tutorials and using AI while working on that case study. Hence how I already know that learning to analyse complex data sets (duplicates, blanks, data with errors and inconsistencies, formulas that work on excel but not DAX, etc) isn’t straightforward. Precisely the point of me asking is to find out if this particular company are very demanding or if this level of data analysis is actually pretty standard for an operational manager in customer experience or similar field. Thanks again