How to choose the right Excel course for your staff?

Use the GRIP framework. GRIP refers to the 4 phases of business analysis: Get, Re-arrange, Investigate, Present

When your staff request to attend an Excel course, they are not really interested in attending any random excel course. They asked for an intermediate or advanced excel course because they do not know how to describe their needs.

Their choice of intermediate or advanced Excel courses is based on their confidence in using Excel. In fact, a lot of them classify advanced Excel users as those who know VLOOKUP and Pivot Table and as intermediate Excel users when they do not know these 2 functions. Of course, some do not even know the existence of VLOOKUP and Pivot Table.

As the training manager, this is where you can value add by matching them to the relevant course instead of sending them to a random Excel course with the lowest price.

Why an intermediate or advanced Excel course doesn’t work?

You see, there are basically more than 500 functions in Excel, Learning all of them is going to take a long time. It cannot be achieved in one or two courses. And not all of them are relevant to their jobs. Knowing all of them is therefore a waste of time.

Based on my past training experience, your staff is likely to feel overwhelmed if more than 20 functions in the course are new to them. Your staff needs time to learn how the functions work and how to make use of them in their day-to-day work. If there is no connection between the Excel function and their job, knowledge retention is going to be low.

A random Excel course is like a cruise to nowhere

Image going on a cruise to nowhere. You don’t know where you are heading. You just know that you are on a cruise, enjoying the facilities and food. At the end of the cruise, you only remember you keep eating and playing all day long.

A random Excel course has the same effect. You can only remember working on one function after another without knowing where these functions can be applied. There is no specific goal.

That’s why when we design our courses, we connect the Excel functions to a single goal, the business analysis and reporting goal. And to increase the retention rate, we use the DRIP framework to break up the main goal into smaller goals. The Excel functions are then incorporated into achieving each smaller goals.

GRIP

GRIP refers to Get, Re-arrange, Investigate and Present.

Ask your staff if they are looking for ways to improve the following activities.

G – Get the data from systems, email, shared folders, online, etc.

R – Rearrange columns, delete rows, beautify description, remove errors, extract records, merge records from the downloaded report/Master list

I – Investigate the changes in performance

P- present the findings of your investigation

Your staff do not know what they don’t know

If they are looking for improvement in the above activities, our courses would be a perfect match for them. Never ask them which functions they would like to learn. They do not know what they don’t know. In our business analysis courses, we have formulated 3 different levels of GRIP.

3 levels of GRIP

The first level is for those who are currently preparing the report manually, spending hours copy and paste numbers onto the report. For these staff, Hidden Secrets of Data Analysis in Excel could help them upgrade from copy and paste to using worksheet functions to calculate the numbers automatically. Not only will they enjoy time-saving in working with Excel, their accuracy in preparing their Excel Business Reports will also increase.

The second level is for those who already using worksheet functions to prepare their business reports. For this group, Secrets Hacks of Excel Data Analytics for PMET would be highly recommended. The course will show them how to make use of the new functions in Excel to prepare their reports and learn how to use data analytics to make better business decisions.

The third level is for staff who are already experts in the Power functions in Excel. They can transfer these power functions in Excel to Power BI and make use of data visualization to communicate their findings effectively to the management. The course Data Visualization in Power BI would upgrade their report presentation skills and help them communicate effectively through charts, tables and images.

All the 3 courses are built on one another and some of the skills used in one course are repeated again in the next level course. This is to help them refresh their skills sets and strengthen their foundation in business analytics as they take up the next level DRIP course.

If you need further clarifications, please send us a message using the form here and we will reply you ASAP.