Above and beyond the skills required for their precise roles, office workers require a set of more generalized abilities that they need to have regardless of their area of specialization. They constitute a sort of coin of the realm for those who engage in all types of business.
Once upon a time, typing and shorthand were the keys to the office world. Computers have changed all that, as just about everyone today knows how to use a keyboard (and, if you don’t know how to touch type, you should put that at the top of your list of business skills to learn.) Although memos and other forms of inter-office correspondence have always existed, the speed and frequency with which missives switch computers today is daunting: email has become the preferred means of communication, even when a brief telephone call or simply leaning over your cubicle wall would suffice. As a result, anyone who aspires to success in an office environment must know how to hammer out an intelligible, mistake-free email on demand.
Other essential skills these days include the ability to navigate an Excel spreadsheet (some questionable online estimates claim that 99.9% of all businesses use Excel), and how to craft a presentation using PowerPoint. In addition to such hard (quantifiable) skills, there is a whole world of unquantifiable but no less necessary soft skills. Those include time management, the ability to work as a part of a team, problem solving, and the ability to deliver a presentation with confidence.
Put all these in a basket, and you have a set of what can be termed basic business skills. You’re going to need them as much as you’re going to need an understanding of accountancy software to work in an accounting department, or a solid grasp on Photoshop if your role is to prepare content for the internet. Basic business skills are essential: if they’re not on your resume, that document is going to be a digital answer to crab cakes made with canned Dungeness crab meat.
Best Business Classes & Schools in Baltimore
Arguably, the most important of the basic business skills you need to make it in an office today is the ability to write. You don’t have to worry about being able to pen the Great American Novel, but you do need enough competency in written English to be able to write and answer the deluge of emails that form part of most office workers’ daily routines. You need to know how to craft prose that makes its point without being full of mixed-up homonyms and grammatical errors. And you should know how to do it without recourse to AI crutches. You can learn all this in the space of a day from the Effective Business Writing class offered by NYC Career Centers. If you fear that your grammar is really shaky (not everyone was lucky enough to have a great fifth-grade English teacher), Career Centers also offers a one-day workshop in Grammar Essentials that goes over the rudiments of this very tricky language of ours.
Similarly useful to you in almost any career pursuit is an understanding of the underlying principles of project management. You don’t have to be a project manager to benefit from a class such as Career Centers’ Project Management Level 1. It will introduce you to such concepts as the five phases of project management, and show you what to expect from the project managers assigned to manage the projects on which you’ll find yourself working. PowerPoint is Microsoft’s presentation software, and it, too, gets used pretty much everywhere and all the time. Noble Desktop offers a PowerPoint in a Day class that will show you how to use the software to build convincing presentations that your audience might actually enjoy attending.
To ace any presentation, however, you’re going to need more than just a snappy series of slides. You’re also going to need the confidence and poise to put your message over, and those don’t come naturally to most people. There are a lot of people who suffer from a fear of public speaking (glossophobia), which is why Zenspeak has a ten-session Overcome Your Public Speaking Fear course. You can schedule your ten sessions at your convenience, and the instructor will gradually desensitize you to your abject terror of facing down a hostile audience before teaching you techniques for addressing and even wowing your listeners. If that sounds like more than you need, Improving Communications has a four-hour workshop entitled Introduction to Public Speaking that will give you some rules, tips, and tricks for how to confront a crowd in the conference room (or at your brother’s wedding.)
All these classes are of the live online variety, which is the direction that business courses of all types are taking. A live online class is truly live, meaning that the teacher is always available to answer your questions in real time, and you can even interact with your classmates. (Do note that, if you’ve always wanted to ride the Acela, Career Centers and Noble Desktop offer in-person classes in New York City.) The immense advantage to an online course is that you can take it from anywhere there is a stable internet connection, be it in your home, at your office, or, if you want to put on a few pounds while you’re learning your basic business skills, at Dangerously Delicious Pies in Canton Square (where you should try the Baltimore Bomb, which puts Berger Cookies into a chess pie filling.)
Baltimore Industries That Use Business
Baltimore is a growing tech city. It’s not exactly the Silicon Valley on the Inner Harbor, but it has been rated tech city number 17 by CBRE (the world’s largest real estate investment firm.) That makes for the expected presence of tech and tech-adjacent jobs, all of which call for the kinds of basic business skills described herein. But, then, so does every other office job in Charm City. Good business skills are essential if you expect to get anywhere in an office-centered career. They’re even more critical if you’re working in a hybrid or a remote capacity, in which email is your lifeline to the office. Simply put, there is no scenario in which you wouldn’t gain from learning how to write stronger English or assemble and deliver convincing presentations. Preparation for an office career should include training in basic business skills, even as you learn the skills required for the career you’re envisioning. The bonus here is that you’ll be able to take these skills with you, not only from job to job, but even from field to field. Few abilities are going to serve you as well as being able to write well in English. Who knows? You might be a case of today, the business email; tomorrow, the Great American Novel.
Business Jobs & Salaries in Baltimore
A somewhat cursory look at Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for the Baltimore/Columbia/Towson metropolitan area (as the BLS defines greater Baltimore) reveals that, out of the approximately 1,295,000 people employed in the area, the largest group of them (more than 161,000 people) are employed in what the BLS terms office and administrative support occupations. To get an idea of the significance of that number, there are barely 33,000 retail salespeople in the area. A further 100,000 people work in the Monumental City at what the BLS classifies as business and financial operations occupations. Salaries for the first category of office workers average out to about $48,000 per annum, while those in the business and financial operations sector are much higher at approximately $91,000 per annum. All these jobs—the reckoning here is hardly exhaustive—call for good basic business skills, and, as the figures show, some of them can be highly well-paid. One in five Baltimoreans is employed in these two sectors; that should be reason enough to want to work on improving your own business skills.