Let Them Eat Cake #6: College Students Ignore Excel and Sales

While colleges advertise their potential to help students find rewarding careers as diplomats, doctors, journalists, lawyers and engineers and other fields associated with the upper class, they frequently avoid preparing their graduates for the real world. In fact, there are several studies that show graduates lack basic soft skills like team work and interpersonal communication and some obvious general skills like arithmetic and writing memos.

But worst than that, students come of college with poor preparation and poor attitudes about two powerful skill areas that can lead to rewarding careers. Not only is an example of colleges selling cake instead of bread; it is also example of impressionable and immature college students preferring cake themselves.

The first skills area is Micro-Soft Excel, a spreadsheet program which can be used for everything from managing lists to do basic statistical analysis. Many of my students have gotten and succeeded in internships and jobs because they could perform the functions of this program. Of course, there are other programs like Micro-Soft Access and SPSS or web design programs that will make students even more desire but having Excel is a requirement for success.
Excel is not just some little trivial computer program, but actually a way of thinking. While students are busy learning that the Security Council of the United Nations has some countries with veto power or that Shakespeare may or may not have been gay, they frequently fail to develop facility with this program. Moreover, they think having Excel skills is beneath them. If only they knew that Excel is Life.

Many students do take a course that requires the learning of Excel. However, like all skill-oriented educational objectives, coursework rarely does the trick. Too many instructors treat teaching Excel like they were teaching history of the middle ages. There will be reading, maybe some exercises and then a test. Like most education, experience is the real teacher so students need to actually do Excel either in a class or in outside projects.

The second skill area the college students fail to appreciate is sales and be prepared for. I have had hundreds of students say to me something like “I didn’t come to college to go into sales.” I don’t know if it was the play Death of a Salesman or just the penchant of Americans to be royalists, but this attitude ignores one basic fact. If you want to rise to the top of your field, you will be a salesperson, selling yourself and your work. To become a partner in a law firm, for example, you cannot just be a solid technical lawyer. Partners bring in new clients which, hello, is sales.

Money is not everything; job satisfaction is important long with many other intangibles. College graduates tend to dismiss sales as a boring and mundane activity. Nothing can be further from the truth. The field of sales is the most demanding of all fields because it requires excellence in many areas: intellect, information gathering analysis, decision-making and the soft skills.
For that reason, the supply of good salespeople never satisfies the demand for them. Consequently, the law of supply and demand operates. Good salespeople can choose their spots and find the companies that provide the rewards and working conditions they prefer. And by the way, today’s successful sales people know Excel like the back of their hands.