What do you do for a living?

[shades]

I am an analyst who provides a variety of reporting sections to senior management. I got the job because I had a math degree, but had never used Excel. My predecessor used Excel but put every bit of data in by hand. Taught myself Excel over the years and within the first year reduced report time on just one report from 4 weeks to 6 hours. Then learned Access (enough to get in trouble? ), and now it is down to 2 hours. Now the job description requires knowledge of Excel and Access, they upgraded the job level, and may do so again this coming year.

Get in, and make your way up/through...

 

[elgringo56]

I am semi retired, started with computers back in 1963 with the US Navy. Now, in my golden years (???), I custom build and repair PC's and do a fair amount of excel work for my customers, making reporting systems for them. I dont make much money doing any of it, but have a hell of a good time at it. Retirement is great if you have a job......

 

[Smitty]

Get in, and make your way up/through...

I can't agree with that one more! I'm an Analyst, whose job has turned largely into Sales Automation Development (building better mousetraps), so our sales reps & managers sell smarter and spend more time selling and less time doing paperwork. But it evolved into that because of what my boss and I saw/thought could be done. I.E. It takes our secretary 6 hours a week to do a weekly sales summary (by hand). Can we speed that up? Thanks to Excel/Access we no longer have a secretary and the process now takes about 45 seconds...

A lot of jobs call for Excel/Lotus experience, but they often require a Finance degree. If you're lucky, you can find a spot like I did, where you actually define the role because no one else knows how it is that you do what you do... :wink:

Unfortunately, mine also requires a lot of buiness writing (contracts, manuals, etc.), so I don't get as much time to Excel now as I'd like. That's one of the dangers of making yourself too efficient; they (they being those nasty folks who sign your check) find other stuff for you to do.

Whatever you decide to do I think that the most important thing is to enjoy it. All the money in the world ain't gonna make you happy at home if you're miserable at work.

Good luck!

Smitty

 

[FinancialAnalystKid]

I'm a financial analyst in the healthcare industry. And most of my counterparts have very limited knowledge with Excel. Of course, they know the basics, but pivot tables, filtering and things like that aren't even in their vocabulary. Which is odd.

It's rare that I encounter a Financial Analyst in my position that even knows how vlookup works.

I taught a co-worker vlookup and some other excel techniques and she went on and found a better job as an analyst. Crazy, huh?

I was stuck in a rut, at another financial analyst position at another healthcare company (which I got because I knew excel better than most), I decided to learn just a little bit more about Excel. Liek - simple pivot table techniques and learning some functions to improve work processes. Then I went on Monster.com, and titled my resume FINANCIAL ANALYST - EXCEL EXPERT and got more calls than I ever got before. I landed a better job in a month that jumped my pay more than 20%!!!

Even after landing this job I was still getting calls and interviews left and right. All because of the title EXCEL EXPERT.

I even got a call from my recruiter who pulled my resume from Monster and told me that I was perfect for another job and realized it was me. He told me to take my resume down for fear my current employers would think I was still looking. So I did.

And just by coming to mrexcel and learning a little VBA, I've made this job more proficient which has turned heads from the big wigs on what can actually be done in a limited amount of time with a financial tool as EXCEL.

Learn as much as you can with Excel then make sure recruiters know what you know and you'll move up faster in the industry if you're into Finance.

Oh... my education is two years undergrad as an Econ major at UCLA then Business Degree at Cal-State Los Angeles. Then a screenwriting certificate at UCLA.

I don't want to be in finance much longer but it pays dabills!

 

[NateO]

Hello,

I buy and sell companies, review/analyze operations and the marketplace, reengineer processes and work with anything technical whether it's finance, accounting, tax law, marketing, IT, etc... As mentioned here:

http://www.puremis.net/excel/MastersText/text_Nate.shtml

I find that a solid working knowledge of Excel helps with all of the above.

 

[XL-Dennis]

Aloha,

Running my own business, MS Excel is one of the tools I daily use for delivering custom solutions.

During the 90's I shipped solutions built solely on Excel. Nowadays Excel is only a part of the solutions. Excel is usually used as the "container" for further data analysis with the built-in tools and/or functions.

The present of huge corporate databases & business-system and more complex enviroments where the solutions will be implemented in push the developing-process to include more tools like VB 6.0 / VB.NET, ADO / ADO.NET / SQL. After all, Excel is per se a spreadsheet-software

Building smaller databases with MySQL and with MS Jet Database Engine is also nowadays part of the developing-process and part of the customs solutions.

To some extend I feel it was less complicated ten years ago then it is today. But I also believe that aging is one of the explanation

 

[zilpher]

I work for a company specializing in public safety software, we do the dispatch systems for the emergency services. My customer is actually a Breakdown Assistance company that uses our software to manage its field force of recovery vehicles.

The technologies are varied, no vba, some vb6, lots of c++, more and more .Net, IBM WebSphere, the list goes on. We use Oracle 10g as the RDBMS and a bespoke data objects interface called RADO, meaning Redundant ActiveX Data Objects, which essentially allows simultaneous read and write to multiple instances of the same database running on different boxes, allowing for redundancy and the ability to lose an instance of the db or even a db server machine without the end user even noticing.

I do a lot of design and build in my position, drawing requirements from the users requires Business Analyst skills, one of my past roles, designing the solution requires Systems Analysis skills, another of my past roles, documenting it all requires a combination of both. The build seems to be the shortest part when compared to getting it through test (the test team decide their own requirements regardless of the original requirements, which is a bind and entirely beyond my control).

I also work with Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows which for me is the most interesting part of working with computers, I really enjoy php, it's actually a pleasure to use.

What I'd like to do is freelance properly using a mixture of all the technologies I am comfortable with, but the pays good where I am, I enjoy the car and the health plan, and the pension and the 30 days holiday a year... someone give me a shove

 

[SydneyGeek]

I work as an Excel and Access consultant, having got here via a science career and a few years as a trainer -- I found the training to be great experience, and it was a fantastic way to get referrals for consulting work.
I agree with the other guys -- you need more than just one skill, and it helps if you can show the client more than one way to reach the solution they need (not always the one they THINK they need!)
The bottom line for me was in keeping the original clients happy, so they ask you back and start referring you around the company, and outside. Once that kicks in you'll be more than fully occupied, and the marketing is free!

Denis

 

[Norie]

Nothing at the moment.

 

[adaytay]

Today is actually my last day of my current job with a large Dairy Goods manufacturer and distributor. I'm employed as a "Customer Service Executive - Performance Measurement Section" - well that's my official job title. I'm actually a Business Analyst, and I look at the systems and processes used within the Customer Services section and try to streamline the process, by writing applications and simple systems to make the staffs' life easier.

So I've written a total of three Access apps, countless Excel spreadsheets with a reasonable level of VBA in, and saved the business somewhere in the region of 1,000 hours a month.

As I've said, today is my last day here (yay!). I'm relocating (tomorrow - 1st Jan 2005!) to a different part of the country and starting work for a small company as an IT Analyst / Programmer / Operative (again, official title). I'll actually be building an IT Department from scratch, customising a purchased Access Database to meet the requirements of the business, as well as supporting the staff in all IT-related issues, procurement and installation of all IT hardware / software, and basically anything you can think of to do with IT in a company network I'll be doing.

Oh... and happy new year everyone

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