Hi guys, my name is Heinrich and welcome to another coffee break with Firm Learning. I hope you're all having a good time. Today I'm talking about how you can actually bring skills to your employer, to the workplace, even as a new business joiner. Even if you're just freshly out of university. And why is all of this even relevant at all? Well the truth is that usually if you start at a new place you are at a big disadvantage in many areas of your work. If you work in IT you first need to learn the system architecture that you're working with. You need to learn the stack that the company is using. It will take you quite some time until you're up to speed and you will usually be at a big disadvantage compared to all the other professionals working in your field. Pretty similar if you work in law. If you're a lawyer. You may come from university where you learnt lots of theoretical knowledge but then being in a law firm. Working on, for instance corporate law, getting all the things done, knowing how all the things are actually done in practice will take you quite some time maybe years to learn until you're at a level where you're on par with other professionals in your field. And of course, if you're a normal business practitioner this is very similar as well. You might work with certain tools, with certain software. There's a certain architecture that the people are working with. And it will take you quite some time until you catch up and really understand all the business processes to a level that other people in the organization who maybe worked there already for several years. However, all these things being said, from my experience after many years in consulting I believe that there are two technical skills that you can learn pretty quickly as a new joiner and if you do you usually, at least in these specific areas, add a significant advantage compared to other people working in your organization. And these two technical skills are first, PowerPoint, being good in PowerPoint and second, Excel, being good at Microsoft Excel. So let's talk about these two. Why are they relevant? Why do I believe that this can really make a difference for your professional life? And what can you actually do to build this skillset and improve your skills? Let's start with PowerPoint. The truth is that pretty much all larger corporations and also most of the SMEs, the small and medium-sized enterprises use PowerPoint on a daily basis in almost all of their business functions. And of course on the one-hand side this is for internal presentations, for internal communication but then on the other side also from communication for external stakeholders like customers, like banks or other investors or any other stakeholder that might be. And you can imagine especially for this latter type of presentations it is super crucial and pretty much always in the highest interest of the C level executives in your company that these presentations are getting done at the highest professional level and they're meeting really the highest out there. If you imagine that usually the sea of offerances need to present something in front of investors, in front of banks, he wants to make sure that the things he present not only in the terms of the content that he's showing but also the style, the formal appearance of the presentation is as professional as it can be. Similar to anything relating to sales presentations in front of customers or other things that might happen, other stakeholders that might be out there. And the other truth is that in a corporation from my experience having worked with many German corporations but also other corporations throughout Europe and also in other continents, very, very few people in an organization, even in a large blue chip company have the skill to create PowerPoint presentations in a way that this really meets this highest of standards. Yes it's true that many people have some basic skills and can create some slides, but these slides are not at a level that you would expect them if for instance you work in a large consulting firm like McKinsey or BCG where these are really skills that are valued and skills are developed and honed over time. So what does this mean for you? If you can bring these PowerPoint skills to the table, if you can get to a level where you are better in creating PowerPoint pages than almost all other people in the organization, this can be a huge advantage for you up to the point that even the CEO, the C level executives of your company want to work together with you even as a junior colleague because you can help them to get these presentations to a level where it's really making a difference for these people. And if you are at the point you suddenly have exposure to the most important, most senior projects that your specific employer is working on and you have direct exposure to these C level executives where other people might need years and years until they are at a point where this might be possible. And again, from my experience from what I have experienced it is not that difficult to get there. I've seen junior colleagues learn these skills in a quite short amount of time and then being sought after by these senior people in organization. So what can you actually do in order to improve your skills in PowerPoint? Well of course one point is always learning by doing. The more presentations you do, the better you will get. But then the other point is also that you need some kind of guidance. You need to know how presentations in front of senior investors, senior customers on board levels, how these presentations actually need to look like because if you have nobody giving you that coaching that you get in consulting, you just cannot get there, right? Because you have no guidance in how to do that. And of course you can ask other people who have done that. You can look at presentations if you get some of that senior level in your company where you see how these are supposed to look like and of course the value that I can bring is in this channel that if you look into the play lists if you look in prior videos I will link a few of them here above, I'm talking about these skills. I'm actually teaching in several of my videos what you need to do in order to get your presentations at that level. So feel free to look at these videos and if you're really serious in developing these skills I actually created a full course, a full online course based on my experience working for over six years at McKinsey on how to create C level type slide presentations. There's a link to this course in the video description below. Don't just take my word for it that it's actually pretty good. Look into the reviews that many other people are giving on the course. I have over ten thousand students who took that course so if you want to learn more check out the link into the description and see if this course might be something that actually adds value to you. The second are where I believe you can quickly add significant amounts of value to your organization as a new joiner is Excel. Skills in Microsoft Excel. Excel is pretty much similar to PowerPoint in the way that it's used by almost every organization out there. While it is true that some alternatives like Altaviz of Tableau for data visualization are being used more and more, Excel is the definite standard on working with data hands down, right? There's no software that is globally used the way that Excel does. No software where you can have so much impact in many organizations just that you can have with Excel. And again, from my experience even working in really super large blue chip companies, many, many people lack basic skills in Excel that if they would have them would really make a difference in your work. And this of course depends a lot on the department. If you work in management accounting, if you work in a controlling department yes their people usually will be quite advanced. But on average people do not have the skills and yes, while they can do some basic things, they will usually not be able to build more complex models, to build more complex dashboards that might really help. And this is actually something that in consulting people do quite often. As a consultant you go into a corporation and while you work on certain tasks you were asked to do pretty frequently they also end up building a couple of models or a couple of Excel dashboards that basically just as a bi-product you give to the client to really help them because you just see the way they're working and you just realize, this is just so crazy that they do not just have that in an Excel model that you can just update regularly, pretty much automatically. But you just see them how they super manually build together reports and you just can't believe that this is what they're doing. And then you try to help them. But this is actually what happens. And as a new joiner this is actually an opportunity for you because you can be the one for your department now builds this model that actually really saves time because before several other colleagues needed to manually compile certain files. You just figured out that based on a data output you get off one of your systems you can just compile a dashboard out of that that really adds value to the people you work with. Usually Excel skills are always sought after. If your team leader, manager, realizes that you are good in Excel and you can build certain things this will help you. He will seek to work with you because you can really make a difference in his life. So yes, building Excel skills is important. I really encourage you to do that and again, how can you actually develop your skills? Here from my experience even more than in PowerPoint it's true learning by doing. You try to solve certain problems in Excel then you will get stuck then you will google that. You will try to read of what you can actually do and then by that you learn, oh, okay. There's this formula that I can use to solve that problem. And then over time you will develop your repertoire, things that you can do. And I encourage you, just get your hands on that, start learning, and do these things. And now I have a question for you. Because I was wondering whether actually videos on the content of Excel on how you can use Excel in a very practical way to build certain models that you will frequently need to build. Whether this is content that would interest you. Would these be videos that you would be interested to see on this channel? Let me know, just write a few comments. Because I'm thinking about making these videos. But it would be great for me to know whether actually there is an interest. Whether you care. Whether you would like to see more about this type of stuff. So let me know, I would very much appreciate your feedback. I have a couple of ideas that I believe would be really valuable and would help you to develop the Access skills. So to summarize, developing your skills in PowerPoint and Excel from my experience is a skills that is relevant in pretty much every industry you work on and pretty much every function you work on. And I believe that there are only very few things that you can learn in terms of skills that will be as broadly applicable that skills in PowerPoint and Excel are and, therefore, as valuable for you as a new joiner. So whenever you have an opportunity to work with these things to develop your skills I can only encourage you to really do that and to seek out additional material out there in order to improve the skills that, again, I made a course on PowerPoint skills on working with PowerPoint as top management consultants would do. Check out the description to learn more. And if you took some value out of this video please press the like button. And if you would like to learn more about things that you can do to improve your career, and the early years of your career, press the subscribe button to stay up to day with all the content on this channel. Thank you for watching. This is Heinrich from Firm Learning.