Professional skills to learn while waiting for your offer letter

Understand the skills to learn today!

Congratulations on making this far in this maddening milieu of corporate hustle! We know how tirelessly you have labored to get past those board room interviews, technical assessments, aptitude screening etcetera and now you wait with crossed fingers for that precious job offer.

Well, waiting is fine for such a worthy achievement but we are here to advocate just the opposite course of action because we strongly believe in “Waiting is the rust of the soul”, which also happens to be a rousing quote by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, an accomplished Spanish author.Instead, we would like you to grow your prospects of excelling at your workplace before you even join; which simply is a highbrow way of saying we want you to work on acquiring some professional skills to learn during this wait.

Why, you ask? Well, for starters it’s a competitive world out there and you are going to see peers from diverse backgrounds and with multiple skill sets. So, instead of trying to learn and keep up with your peers during the job, why not save yourself the ensuing trouble and acquire these skills to learn now to have an edge over them.

So, without any further ‘waiting’ we present to you a meticulously compiled list of skills to learn which are ubiquitous and everlasting in nature.

Excel

Whether it is a small business or a big corporation, excel is everywhere. Since its release in 1985, excel is used to collect, review, model and analyze almost any kind of data. It is also one of the most underrated skills to learn in the workplace. This is one very important skill to learn.

Get your hands dirty with some excel practice and show-off with some charts and graphs in your first presentation. In addition to adding actual value to your skill-set, it automatically makes you the go-to guy in your office for meetings and presentations.

Touch typing

Wikipedia defines touch typing as typing using the sense of sight to find the keys. A touch typist relies on his muscle memory to remember his location on keyboard. This is one very important skills to learn.

Remember all the cool hackers in the movies typing away their faux-codes on computers in those shameless jokes of a hacking scene? Well, that hacking might be a little far-fetched but the typing part is not; that’s exactly what touch typing looks like. Besides looking awesome and impressive it saves you time, increases your typing speed, increases productivity and reduces the errors.

For lessons you may try following link-  https://www.typing.com/student

Writing

From writing job-application cover letters to sending e-mails, this skill is as essential as breathing. We cannot stress enough on the importance of writing over the span of your career. Whatever your field of work, writing helps you clear your mind, streamline the thinking process, induce thought clarity and generate new ideas.

Since proficiency in written skills to learn among most individuals is not as great as reading or speaking, it sets you apart from your corporate colleagues in a unique way. This is one very important skills to learn.

It’s almost always free to learn professional writing with numerous resources present on the web like – https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/

Short form note-taking

A subsection of writing but a totally different game in its own league due to the swift and flexible nature of circumstances it’s done under. In corporates, this skill gives you an advantage in meetings (since, you’ll be better than others in listening as well as recording it) and build a great rapport with your bosses. This is one very important skills to learn.

A masterly note-taking skill assists you to pick the important from the junk, understand and remember material, and structure the events that happened in a meeting. Various forms, techniques and tips in note taking are readily available on the web so invest some time and reap the benefits of a technique that’s as useful in life as at work.

Personal Budgeting

There’s a quote by financial author Dave Ramsey that goes like, “A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went”. That’s the simplest definition of budget ever. This is one very important skill to learn.

Since budgeting allows you to have a spending plan for your money, it ensures you always have enough money for things you need and are important to you. As we all know, pitfalls of starting a new job are mostly money-related because, let’s face it, we never learnt how to manage our money in college and having our own income only leaves time for spending, not for careful money-planning.

Hence, as a crash course in personal finance, get busy reading and learning about the principles in forecasting, planning etc.  so your money doesn’t miraculously disappear before the final week of each month and you’re left burning a crater on your credit card.

Those were the most essential hard-skills to learn you’ll need in a new job to avoid slogging during later months. While that is in no way an extensive list of useful skills to learn during your job but they’re enough to get you to a stellar launch.