Photoshop for creative work, or QuickBooks to manage accounting tasks. There are also general business skills that anyone who wants to work successfully in an office environment needs to possess. You won’t be able to get ahead without them, and you should make time to learn them alongside the more specialized skills your field requires.
Paramount among these is business writing. Office workers today are constantly receiving and responding to digital correspondence, often as many as 80 times a day. In this age of email, people who used to be able to discuss work matters more or less casually over the phone now have to write down their ideas, preferably clearly, concisely, and without emojis. Poor writing skills are among the factors most likely to hold you back in your career.
Another office essential is Microsoft’s spreadsheet software, Excel. It is used very widely in today’s business world for everything from making lists to creating balance sheets, and knowledge of what’s been hailed as the best thing ever invented by Microsoft is sure to come in handy at some point in your career. You might as well be prepared and have it listed among the skills on your resume.
In addition to these two hard skills, you’re going to need soft skills if you’re to succeed. “Soft skills” is an umbrella term for such accomplishments as public speaking, interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, and, in general, learning how to talk to people to get them to do what you want them to do without having them hate you for it. Make no mistake: those are things that can and need to be learned, and there is much to be gained from attending classes in these semi-intangible topics.
Best Business Classes & Schools in Minneapolis
In the workplace, few skills are going to show you in a better light with your supervisors and colleagues than the ability to write well. Businesses produce reams and reams of documents, each of which has to be written, and quite a few of which are grammatical, syntactic, and lexical disasters. Those cast their writers in an immediately poor light, something you can avoid by taking a class in business English. Mistake-ridden, hard-to-understand emails are not going to endear you to those working above you. On the other hand, with a little application and the proper training, you’ll be able to turn out admirably clear business prose.
Business writing classes come in a variety of forms. If you only have a day to spare to improve your writing, you can consider NYC Career Centers’ Effective Business Writing, an intensive workshop that gives students who are relatively new to the workforce a solid grounding in the practices of writing for business in that relentlessly confusing language known as English. If you wish to take a longer course, Gotham Writers Workshop has a six-module on-demand Business Writing Level 1 class that delves more thoroughly into its topic and affords you more flexibility when it comes to when you do your learning. Both schools offer intermediate/advanced writing classes as well.
Excel is spreadsheet software that gets used for a lot more than just spreadsheets. Microsoft may not even have imagined some of the uses to which people put the software. To succeed in business with or without really trying, you’re going to need to know how Excel works. You don’t need to have total control over the software, but you do need to be able to create and work with a spreadsheet. Nowadays, a resume without Excel listed among your skills is like a Juicy Lucy without the cheese. An excellent way to learn a lot about Excel and get your knowledge certified by Microsoft is NYIM Training’s Excel Expert Certification course. It requires only three days to complete and comprises the school’s beginner, intermediate, and advanced Excel classes. It also tacks on a 1-to-1 coaching session to get you ready for the Microsoft certification exam, which is included in the price of the course. If you’re looking for something less in-depth, Computer Training Source has an Excel Introduction that lasts a day and gives students a basic conversational knowledge of Excel and its capabilities.
For the elusive but vitally necessary soft skills, you may want to consider a class such as the four-morning Business Soft Skills from Digital Workshop Center. The class covers time management, personal leadership, and even success management, all of which are examples of the kinds of non-technical skills people are going to expect you to possess when you show up for your first day of work. You might not need it on your very first day, but being an effective public speaker can help you conquer that chronic beast, the office presentation. Zenspeak Public Speaking Center offers a ten-session workshop entitled Overcome Your Public Speaking Fear that starts out with desensitizing exercises to help people get over the glossophobia from which everyone suffers to a degree, before showing them the right way to speak to crowds, be they of ten, a hundred or (if you end up in the unenviable position of being best man at a really, really big wedding) a thousand.
Although the above courses originate in New York, Chicago, and Colorado, they are available online. In all but the asynchronous Gotham Writers Workshop entrant, you’ll be able to interact with the teacher even if the two of you aren’t in the same physical location. Indeed, the teacher may be holed up in some uncomfortable classroom somewhere, while you can take the class from just about anywhere in the Twin Cities, be it from your office, home, or the Victorian intimacy of the uptown Uncommon Grounds Coffee House.
Minneapolis Industries That Use Business
The kinds of business skills under consideration here are helpful in just about any office job in just about any field, be it a tech start-up or a particularly old-fashioned law firm. From advertising to the zoo, business skills are as transferable as skills get. You’ll need them wherever you go, and they’ll follow you from spot to spot as your career progresses. Most jobs call for special skills that you need to do them. Those same jobs also have skills in common, precisely things like business writing, Excel, and, especially, real soft skills (as opposed to meaningless resume phrases such as “self-starting team player.") Basic business skills aren’t all that hard to come by, and the investment you’ll make in acquiring them will be repaid several fold over the course of your career.
Business Jobs & Salaries in Minneapolis
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for May 2022 reveal that for the Minneapolis/St. Paul/Bloomington area, the leading category of employed people was the office and administrative support rubric: it accounted for nearly 230,000 jobs that call for basic business skills. The mean wage for the sector was approximately $50,000. Only two items lower on the list was the business and financial operations category, in which roughly 158,000 people toiled away for a mean salary of nearly $90,000 per annum, again while exercising basic business skills. Management occupations accounted for 137,000 more jobs in the area, with a very nice mean salary of $133,500 that’s earned by virtue of abilities such as sound business English, being able to use Excel, and strong, soft managerial skills that include conflict resolution and that always important ability to speak in public when called upon to do so. There are thus at least 525,000 Minneapolitan/Saint Paulite/Bloomingtonian office workers (out of roughly 1,185,000 total jobs) for whom basic business skills were part and parcel of their daily routine. Thus, if you’re a job seeker in the greater Minneapolis area and your ambitions are greater than a retail job in the Mall of America, you can’t brush up your written business English soon enough.