Think twice before you put MS Word as a skill on your resume

Islamabad

It has been ages since we last heard about a booming job market. A majority of the fresh graduates is seen complaining about lack of jobs or inadequate salary packages. Employers, on the other hand, complain about the quality of available human resource.

Sana Khalid, the brain behind a social youth enterprise operating in Islamabad by the name of Minerva, runs an internship and training programme for students and fresh graduates. She says, “Our training programmes have been designed in response to abundance of unemployable or unwanted human resource. There isn’t a dearth of people looking for jobs; neither is there a shortage of jobs in the market, but there is a huge gap between what employers are willing to pay for and what these prospective employees have to offer.”

With increasing inflation, cut-throat competition and rising political issues, employers no longer want to spend time or resources training people for basic skills like writing e-mails, communicating with people, producing a presentable document, and so on.

MS Office is one such skill that students, graduates and professionals very conveniently and confidently place on their résumés. “Most of these people are not really consciously manipulating the employer into believing they know the skill. They actually believe they know it because they’ve been using MS Word and MS Excel for most of their lives now,” explained Sana.

“MS Word is more than entering text and changing font sizes. MS Excel offers amazing features for data analysis, etc. You can make something no less than payroll programmes and inventory tracking systems using MS Excel. MS Office should not be a skill anyone adds to their CV, regardless of the level of expertise. We therefore, plan to turn it from just a skill to an actual score on the CV that gives a more objective evaluation of a person’s skill,” Sana explained when asked what was so special about a training that appears more like a thing of the past.

One of the participants of the MS Word training, Zeeshan Ali, senior marketing manager at BioCare Labs said, “We have been using MS Word for ages now. It was hard to believe how we had very little knowledge of a majority of the features we learnt here. We always thought we knew Word. We use it every day.”

Another participant Maria Iqbal, who teaches at a private institute reported, “I have wasted endless hours doing things I could have done in just a click, if only I had attended this training earlier. I can now help my students with the same. These two days were truly full of information and knowledge. I will no longer be spending hours on preparing a table of contents manually.”

The MS Office trainings designed by Minerva are unique in more than one ways. The course design encompasses all of the most useful features, commands and options in MS Word 2013 without segregation into basic, intermediate and advanced.

Increased levels of interaction and practical exercises are also a dominant feature of the training but what is most important to note is the scoring of each participant’s skills at the beginning and end of the training. The sessions are highly recommended for fresh graduates, professionals at all levels, entrepreneurs, and students who frequently work on research essays and papers. Source