When you are considering applying for an HR Job you may ask yourself, what are the skills required for an HR job? This is a question many people will be asking themselves before they decide to embark on an HR career. The reality is that HR requires a wide range of knowledge that is required, including HR qualifications, degrees and much more. However, one of the practical skills that will be required in Human Resources is Microsoft Office and other IT skills. We will look at the Microsoft Office skills that would be most relevant to HR professionals. That will help you deliver well in your HR job and prepare for a career in HR.
HR professionals often encounter large amounts of data in many areas. It could be in headcount planning, analysing costings, budgeting for training, planning training needs, doing HR strategic planning, and many other tasks. This means that you are likely to encounter big data, and naturally, the most common program for these activities is Excel. Therefore, Excel is a key skill for HR professionals. HR does a lot of analysis using Excel, as well, so this is particularly important to ensure you are an advanced Excel user.
Microsoft Office Programs are used in HR
HR presents a lot of data, policies and procedures. Stakeholders often need nice easy to understand visual presentations. This means that HR professionals will need to use PowerPoint to a proficient level, and they will also need to be a good presenter. This is particularly important for HR professionals that are aiming to be HR Managers, because they are likely to be delivering presentations. However, if you are an HR Assistant you may have to help your manager prepare a presentation.
HR holds lots of personal information and confidentiality. Therefore, file management systems like SharePoint are likely to be a core skill for many HR professionals. You need to understand how to protect and administer data. You need to understand how to file data, keep records and the increasing this is delivered through SharePoint, although there are other alternatives as well.
HR Management Data
Power BI is growing in importance for HR, because of the amount of analysis of data, and presentations of information. Power BI provides summaryformat and managerial dashboards. Therefore, Power BI is relatively new program compared to Excel or PowerPoint, but it will grow in the future.
Microsoft Visio is a program that enables you to create charts, and in particular organisational charts. You can also design process diagrams. Both of these can be relevant to an HR department. Therefore awareness of Microsoft Visio is a great addition to any HR professional CV.
Teamwork with Microsoft Office
You will be required include Microsoft Teams for your virtual communication, which is likely to come up quite often in the modern working place. Furthermore, Office 365 is likely to be used in the office now. This means that you must be able to adapt to using the cloud. We other specific courses such as our Excel for HR Course and more broad training in our Microsoft Office Diploma for HR.
Do not forget that HR professionals need a wider range of IT skills. One of the most important ones will be having HR software knowledge. Common examples of HR software include PeopleSoft from Oracle, Workday and SAP to name a few. HR systemshave similar features and moving from one to the other is possible. You should also consider learning how to interact with ERP systems, which is the company’s financial system. However, HR systems and ERPs are likely to interact with Microsoft Office in reality, when you export and import data.