Is it normal to spend time upskilling out of work?
I'm really new to consulting, haven't even hit the 4-month mark yet. I've received feedback that I should work on my PPT and Excel skills. I'm working on a lot of proposals so I do a lot of PPT learning on the job, but haven't had a chance to really practice Excel yet.
So it seems like I'll have to practice Excel outside of work. I don't mind doing this, but is it normal for people to spend time upskilling outside of work? Sorry if this is a stupid question; I know consulting isn't known for good WLB.
I think upskilling outside of work is the equivalent of setting work-life boundaries. The question varies based on who you ask.
A Partner from Monitor Deloitte once said that the company will always have work for those who are willing and that at the junior level, it's important to know what your boundary or limit is. With that said, for something like Excel and PowerPoint, I personally think upskilling in those is easy to do.
For Excel, I can't stress this enough: DON'T get some inane course that defines everything. I'd say it's much quicker to read an Excel formula and it's use-case than to go on Udemy and watch a video about it. The quickest and most efficient way to upskill in Excel is to give yourself an assignment and then google different logic functions and put them to practical use. I remember I got really good with Excel in 2nd year by essentially replicating a three-statement model that the lecturer gave out and my basis was to re-create and remap the logic functions and then create a more robust scenario analysis formula.
In doing this, I used advanced logic functions that I googled (ExcelJet in particular was great), Youtube'd and bootstrapped to get working. Another time, when I was at an internship, my boss asked me to create an Excel sheet that would pull data from two different Excels through a variable formula. So... I had to use the indirect data validation mixed with multi-variate index match functions. All of which I learned whilst creating the report.
The above advice is what has worked for me when I was upskilling in Excel (and equivalently PPT).
You can check the WSO Excel Modeling Course and PowerPoint Course. Extremely helpful :)
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