Is there a standardized excel knowledge test and or certification? As a senior analyst excel expertise is requisite, but is very hard to interview for...I had to make an excel test just to empirically rate our analyst candidates. I know there are the excel competitions (http://www.modeloff.com/) and great resources (http://www.chandoo.com/wp), but no rating system for knowledge (even basic) of excel. Think the big investment banks would be interested in "testing" their analysts empirically before hiring them?
everyone employed to a relevant position at our company takes a pretty in depth excel assessment so we know what they need taught on Day 1.
Named ranges/tables is always top of the list!
edit: business schools usually make you take an excel course/exam your first year. Its always awful, using some absurdly priced flash-based webapp from 2003 that has such strict validation on answers/inputs, you often struggle just to input your answer because you solved it in a different manner than they expect. So, the IBs likely think you know Excel before getting in the door (which is not always the case).
Investment Banks do not really expect juniors to have advanced excel skills before they join. In fact they normally do not expect them to know anything about their job, outside of having a personal interest and curiosity about finance and be eager to learn.
Now in practice it doesn't always work like that but I still agree with that philosophy. We should be hiring smart people, not people with knowledge. Smart people can always acquire or build the knowledge they need quickly. Knowledgeable people can't really get smarter.
From what I've seen at my work most of the analysts tend to use specialized BI tools rather than excel.
Excel is mostly used for data transformations. Pretty much every tool can "speak" excel so typical work flow is to extract data using tool A dump it into excel. Save it and Upload from excel into tool B.
This is for business analytics rather than Finance/banking. Is excel really that common in that world?
I work at an industrial plant. Excel is used a lot here too. But not for technical analytic work. Nothing you'd need to pass an exam to know how to do.
The Analysts here tend to use programs like Cognos, SAP Business Objects etc.
Interestingly, as part of my college (pre-University, as I'm UK, and I'm unsure what the American equivalent is (think the gap between high-school and University)) – we had to do a module called ECDL (European Computer Driving License) which was basically the Microsoft Office suite, this would apparently be a boon for employers wanting to guarantee a basic level of competence... and I still don't know Excel (but passed that course.)
Simple, timed exercises are highly effective. I (and almost everyone I know) has one built that they use. I can look through their work and know (1) if they are really an export, and (2) if they're even trainable.
Happy to share noah (dot) barr (at) GOOG's email service
