A surprising amount of business activity depends on Excel.Many of the most valuable skills aren’t cutting-edge; instead, they involve being highly skilled with a commonly used tool.

Being Really Good at Excel

Being able to organize and express your thoughts in a way that makes action items jump out and reduces back-and-forth is a tremendous asset.Email is the basis for a dizzying amount of our work. Many workplace email threads I’ve seen are sloppy and disorganized which leads to a sea of noise.&nbsp;

Writing Good Emails

Being non-terrible as a speaker is enough to make you stand out at conferences and meetings.At a minimum, you should be able to deliver a talk without reading notes or slides, communicate concisely, and pivot your presentation depending on the needs of your audience.

Being a Non-Terrible Public Speaker

Part of this skill is simply being organized and productive. But a lot of it is also about managing expectations.&nbsp;Many people, who feel unable to push back against demands, reluctantly agree to work they’re not sure they can deliver on. And this often backfires and makes them seem less reliable in the future.

Getting Everything Done You Said You Would

Finding a comprehensive answer to a question is valuable in any field.Getting answers from other people is itself an art that requires practice. Even if you can’t be the smartest person in the room, you can learn to access what the smartest people think.

Researching Effectively

Most of our experience with math in school is finding exact answers to precisely worded questions. This is a shame because very few problems in life are like this. Instead, we more often face vague problems where only some of the numbers needed are known.Practicing the ability to quickly ballpark numbers, to make valid estimates of what things should be, is helpful for any quantitative line of work.

Ballparking Numbers

Getting quickly on top of new software is increasingly a requirement for professions outside of IT. Doctors, teachers, lawyers and engineers constantly face new technical interfaces with their work—if you struggle to learn new software, your core professional skills may be undervalued.

Learning New Software Quickly

Learning is an investment. Which skills will pay off? Here are seven, frequently overlooked, abilities worth mastering.

Stashed ideas

Learning as Investing: 7 Skills That Pay Off in Any Job | Scott H Young

We mostly learn by doing, yet school mostly replaced apprenticeships as a form of learning. One reason why schools replaced hands-on learning is that apprenticeship is suitable for smithing and weaving, but modern work is mental and needs dedicated training inside the classroom. However, this answer is false as many knowledge positions need some apprenticeship. For example, doctors must complete a residency, lawyers need to article, and grad school for scientists is really an apprenticeship.

Apprenticeships as a mode of learning

Teaching students in a classroom is cheaper than training them on the job, which can be very costly.  However, apprenticeship suffers from credible commitment - the master wants cheap labour, and the apprentice wants to learn. But if the apprentice learns too quickly, he can take his knowledge and leave, robbing the master of his payment. The master may also drag out the apprenticeship to retain cheap labour.

Apprenticeships are expensive

Education serves two purposes:<ul><li dir = "auto">Teaching valuable knowledge and skills. This is known as the human capital theory.</li><li dir = "auto">Ranking students according to their ability, conscientiousness and ambition. This is known as signalling theory.</li></ul> If an apprenticeship is costly, it makes sense to only focus on top applicants. A school could serve to filter students who can learn the best. However, signalling also increases competition. Students may go deeper into debt to get an MA so that they can gain an edge over the competition.

Education is mostly signalling

While formal apprenticeship programs have declined, learning by doing has not. For example, how much of what you do now was learned on the job compared to in school? Yet, schools get most of the credit for knowledge gained. Most people still learn their jobs by training under experienced practitioners, from plumbers to particle physicists. This means that our mode of learning hasn't changed in modern times, but we often don't recognise it.

Formal apprenticeship programs have declined

We largely learn by doing. So why have apprenticeships all but disappeared, while school has become expensive and mandatory?

Why Aren't There More Apprenticeships? | Scott H Young

Math is often seen as something you get or you don&#39;t. Most of us sit in class feeling like we don&#39;t. The fault is not with the subject itself but rather with the way we teach it. Mathematician Paul Lockhart wrote a 25-page essay titled &quot;A Mathematician&#39;s Lament&quot;, wherein he states that students who feel that their mathematics classes are boring are right.
The true nature of math is art. Unfortunately, we wrongly teach it in a way that would just as easily ruin any other art.

Why math classes are dull

Consider what music or painting would look like if we treat it like the typical math curriculum. <ul><li>What if music education was all about theory, dots and lines that make up the language of music? What if playing and listening to music was put off until college?</li><li>Or, what if art students had to spend years only studying paints and brushes? Then they do pre-paint-by numbers to prepare them for the main paint-by number sequence. From there, only the students who know their colours and brushes get to actually paint.</li></ul>

The harm of the typical math curriculum

Like art, the purpose of math is the creation of patterns. And the material we use to create patterns is ideas. Math then belongs to the realm of fiction. For example, we can imagine a geometric shape with perfect edges, knowing that it could never exist in the real world. Then we can ask questions about it and create explanations. Yet, when we teach math, we aim to repeat the steps of someone else's creation without asking how they got there, or why.

Math is about creating ideas

An education in the art of mathematics is all about discovery. It means solving a problem that speaks to us at that point in time. It is a slow and thoughtful process. But, of course, it is much simpler to post a set of rules than to guide an artist.  Mathematics should be something we do because it is an interesting and challenging way of teaching ourselves new ways of thinking and expressing ourselves.

How to improve math education

There are two types of people in the world: those who enjoyed mathematics class in school, and the other 98% of the population. According to mathematician Paul Lockhart, that's because we fail to treat math as an art.

Why Math Class Is Boring—and What to Do About It

School time was an anxiety-filled period for most, if not all, of us.&nbsp;Yet, school time is considered crucial for imparting education in children, and parents spend a lot of time, money and effort ensuring their kids are completing school and college.What if all the knowledge that is provided to kids in school could simply be inserted in their brains, just like Neo’s brain in The Matrix is uploaded with knowledge about kung-fu and other fighting techniques, instantly making him a ninja?

The Twelve Years Spent At School

The thought experiment of being able to insert knowledge and other desirable states instantly in the brain raises some interesting questions and caveats.<ul><li>Uploading knowledge inside the brain frees up thousands of hours, otherwise required for the slow, conventional learning process.</li><li>Side-lessons, the unexpected stuff we learn while getting educated, are lost if the entire learning process is reduced to a few minutes.</li></ul>

Inserting Knowledge In The Brain

The three things that add value to our lives are:<ol><li>Pursuing goals of value(the effort).</li><li>Achieving valuable goals(the achievement).</li><li>Being in a state of value.</li></ol>Hours of practice and effort leads to achievement and a transformation to a particular state. Knowledge, if earned, feels deserving and adds a sense of accomplishment.

The Value Of The Journey

Insertion of knowledge robs one of the connections and relationships that are formed with teachers, mentors, parents and school mates, which have their own intrinsic value.The time spent in school has various emotional, intuitive, imaginative, attentive, responsive aspects apart from a mere transfer of knowledge.

Pedagogical Relationships

Insertion of knowledge has another potential problem: unpredictable changes in behaviour, personality or character. The person who has had new knowledge inserted in the brain may become a completely different person who can feel alien to us.We should tread with caution about the unpredictable aspects of inserting instant knowledge inside us, as it is a shortcut that can be extremely beneficial, but have unwanted side-effects.The journey is part of the destination.

Becoming A Different Person

What does the knowledge insertion thought-experiment tell us about the costs and benefits of the learning experience?

Imagine you could insert knowledge into your mind: should you? | Psyche Ideas

In the 1970s, social scientists coined the term &quot;credentialism&quot;. It is an ideology that puts formal education credentials above other ways of understanding human potential and ability.
Credentialism is again entering the higher education debate as academics and the wider public try to make sense of the current university system.

Credentialism is reducing qualifications to status

Problem Solving

<ul>
<li>Students are unsure if their degrees are worth the high tuition fees. </li>
<li>University academics bemoan the factory style teaching system.</li>
<li>Online learning and the growth of accredited university certificates through MOOCs (massive open online courses offer alternatives) offer an alternative. </li>
</ul>
While these issues are important to debate, they ignore the fundamental value of credentials in the workplace.

Issues concerning the future of universities

<ul>
<li>A university degree is now considered to be the ultimate status symbol for entry into the middle classes across the world. It is a basic requirement for any professional occupation.</li>
<li>Certificates are not meaningless. There is still a so-called graduate premium in economic terms because employers value the added skills.</li>
<li>In social terms, a university degree provides non-market benefits that are difficult to measure, including longer life expectancy, more leisure time, social mobility, and lower propensity to commit crime.</li>
</ul>

University degree: A basic requirement

The concept of credentialism can be a type of class prejudice.
We need to ensure that university is more than a rite of passage coming together in a piece of paper. It is the role of the academic profession and higher education institutions to shape worthwhile learning. However, higher education is vulnerable to abuse without regulation, such as buying fake nursing degrees that can lead to tragic outcomes. A formal qualification should be a representation of something more important.

Beware of class prejudice

Gaining that required qualification to put on your CV is what counts to win a job in today’s “graduate economy”. On current trends, perhaps everyone will have a degree by the end of this century. Already…