The Excel Skills That Actually Get You Hired (And What to Ignore)

Look through a hundred job adverts for operations, finance, admin, logistics or analyst roles in almost any African market, and Excel appears in most of them. It is also the skill most people overstate on their CV and then fail the practical test on.

The good news: the useful part is small and learnable in a few weeks.

The list that matters

1. Clean data entry and formatting. Consistent columns, proper date formats, no merged cells, no values stored as text. Unglamorous and it is what most workplace spreadsheets fail at.

2. Sorting and filtering. Including filtering across several columns at once.

3. Core formulas. `SUM`, `AVERAGE`, `COUNT`, `COUNTA`, `MIN`, `MAX`, `ROUND`. Know absolute references (`$A$1`) and why they matter — this is the single most common thing people get wrong.

4. Logic. `IF`, nested `IF`, `AND`, `OR`, `IFERROR`. `IFERROR` alone will make your sheets look twice as professional.

5. Lookups. `VLOOKUP` at minimum; `XLOOKUP` or `INDEX`/`MATCH` if your version supports it. This is the skill most often tested in interviews.

6. Conditional counting and summing. `COUNTIF`, `COUNTIFS`, `SUMIF`, `SUMIFS`. Enormously useful in real reporting work.

7. Pivot tables. The highest-value item on this list. Being able to take five thousand rows and produce a clear summary in two minutes is the thing that visibly impresses in an interview.

8. Charts. Column, line and pie, formatted so they are readable. Know when each is appropriate.

9. Text functions. `LEFT`, `RIGHT`, `MID`, `TRIM`, `CONCAT`, `TEXT`. Real data is always messy.

10. Print and share setup. Print area, freeze panes, headers. Small, and it is what separates a sheet someone can use from one they cannot.

What you can safely ignore at first

Macros and VBA, Power Query, complex array formulas, financial modelling functions. All useful eventually, none of them required for the roles that ask for "strong Excel skills". Learn them when a job actually needs them.

How to learn it properly

Not by watching videos. By using real data.

Find a dataset — your own expenses, a public dataset, sales figures from a small business you know — and answer questions with it. Total by month. Top ten by value. Compare two periods. Build a pivot table and a chart from it. Every question you answer teaches more than an hour of watching.

Give yourself three weeks of an hour a day. That is genuinely enough to reach the level most adverts mean by "strong Excel skills".

On your CV, and in the test

Be specific and be honest: "Excel: pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, charts." That is more credible than "Advanced Excel" and it tells the reader exactly what you can do.

Then be ready to prove it. Practical Excel tests are common, usually timed, and usually involve exactly the items on the list above. Candidates who claim "advanced" and then cannot build a pivot table lose the role on the spot — often for a job they could have done.