One of the reasons I left college was because learning wasn’t enjoyable anymore. Finding a good class was like throwing darts at a course list. The classroom environment sterilized many of the subjects and made things that might actually be enjoyable complete drudgery.
I’d like to present a case study for you. Attempting to learn Excel in a college class vs. learning it in the real world.
I took one semester of Microsoft Excel in college, and I hated it. I’m honestly not even sure if I finished that semester. I would come in and sit down, be spoon fed the most very basic things about excel. I understood every word, because there was nothing challenging about the course. They gave us excel problems that yes, were technically a challenge, but had no meaning, no life, no purpose aside from “learning the basics of Excel.”
Do you have any idea how boring Excel is with no context? Of course you do. I retained almost nothing from that class. I’m really not sure what I kept from the class and what I picked up in random places and remembered when I needed it at the start of working for ADS Security.
And so I came into ADS wth practically no knowledge of Excel. You know what one of my first projects was? I decided that ADS might benefit from a report on the demographic data of their branches. That was done within a few weeks. It got much harder, much faster.
The big project for the first 3 months was to analyze ADS’s data on customer attrition (that’s customers leaving the company for various reasons. Home security is a subscription service, and they want to keep customers for as long as possible. Who’da thought.)
I was fortunate enough to have an incredibly skilled Excel user as my marketing director and mentor. Alex Malone taught me about vlookups, pivot tables, filters, formulas and logic. Everything that the excel semester tried to teach me I learned in a month and a half. Since then, I’ve learned things my teacher didn’t know.
Just today I revisited a problem that he and I tried to solve 2 or 3 months back. We had tried to make a report that displayed all the salesmen’s earnings for the company. The trick was the contest the rookies were in.
Rookies, salesmen who were 6 months or less into their employment, could compete against each other. After they were rookies, their contributions to that contest would stop, and their score would continue accumulating like the other vets.
I needed a way to show what they earned in their first 6 months and what they earned afterwards from a single report of what they had earned this year. Alex and I tried to figure out a way for quite a while, but nothing we came up with worked. We had to input all of that data by hand.
Today, as I made my reports for the past month and was looking at this very report, I had a flash of insight. All of the Excel I had done, all of the tricks and formulas I had learned, and all of the creativity I had used in creating solutions came together to show me exactly how to make this report.
I was able to automate the entire thing. You only need to copy the new information into the sheet, change the month in a single equation, and everything in the sheet populates itself. Since this is a report that needs to be run every month, I’ve shorted a task that used to take 2-3 hours and shortened it to a few minutes at most.
And do you know the strangest part? It was fun.
This is the power of learning with meaning. Classrooms have no emotive meaning behind what they try to teach, unless it’s a very good teacher. Learning is so much more effective when you are applying what you learn immediately to bring value.
What’s something you want to learn? Figure out a way to use it to improve your job, or try to sell the skill. I guarantee you will learn much faster, much more thoroughly, and much more enjoyably.
Time to start an excel tutoring company…?