It seems to me that more universities would at least be requiring testing to establish a baseline expectation for employers to rely upon. Some people are good at picking this up on the job, but others will defer to someone else throughout their whole career or worse yet, do things the slow and hard way. I guess it’s good that most accountants bill by the hour, but it seems you could make better use of those hours with better use of tools.

The largest competitive advantage I’ve had in every office job I’ve worked thus far in my life has stemmed from my computer skills. Every firm/company seems to retrain their employees to their own strategies, business plans, and processes. The one constant requirement that doesn’t change is being able to utilize Excel, Access, and even Word to do work efficiently. The use of these applications varies little across organizations, and yet they are what we learn least about in school. It’s highly disappointing in my mind, especially in a professional that makes a living out of manipulating large amounts of data and formulas.