3 Software Courses To Expand Your Career Options

3 Software Courses To Expand Your Career Options

Computers have become such an essential part of the way businesses operate that almost every job requires at least some level of IT skills. However, even if you are perfectly computer literate, you can still expand your career options by getting to grips with certain software. This may involve learning how to use packages that don’t already feature in your skill set, or improving your skills to reach intermediate or expert level.

Here are a few tools you should consider getting more familiar with:

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Office’s spreadsheet offering may not be the most exciting piece of software at consumer level, but it drives a wealth of business operations. Building up your Excel skills can really open up new career options. Various levels of Excel capability are needed for careers in finance and accounting, statistics and many other numerate fields. Many companies and departments also use Excel in various ways to keep track of workloads, targets and other data.

A number of courses are available in Excel, including some easy-to-access online courses that you can study in your spare time at home. To view a range of available Excel courses for different ability levels, click here.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the go-to program for image editing in almost every business. Improving your Photoshop skills will be useful in a huge wealth of careers, particularly in digital or web-related fields. Many roles within editing and website administration require at least a basic grasp of Photoshop which will allow you to manipulate images to fit with the final page.

More advanced Photoshop skills are an important step on the way to careers that are more exclusively focused on images and graphical media. Examples of this type of career include graphic design, photography, and post-processing of photographic images. Photoshop is also an important part of the workflow for many web designers. The designs for web pages are often constructed in Photoshop, using layers to create a framework of page elements in order to avoid starting from scratch.

Oracle

Oracle is the most popular database management system, and many companies rely on it for maintaining databases where a large amount of vital information needs to be safely stored away. Learning how to use Oracle will open up careers in data management, and in fields that rely heavily on data such as IT or finance.

Many other jobs require employees to enter information into a database. This particularly applies to technical roles, especially where some form of testing is involved, and to research where survey responses often have to be logged into databases. As such, learning to use Oracle will be a step towards many technical or scientific careers as well as careers in areas such as market research.

While a number of different database software packages are in use by different businesses, including some custom-built in-house solutions, Oracle remains the most popular option. Furthermore, learning to use Oracle will give you a vital understanding of how databases work, and make it much easier to adapt to other, similar applications (such as Microsoft Access) if a role requires it.