Rich Talbot asked:


Returning to work after a long absence can be very daunting. If you left work to spend some time at home, perhaps to bring up young children, the chances are you’re worried about getting back to work.

Skills Required

The first step is to find out which skills are currently in demand in your chosen industry, perhaps by contacting your local job centre or by getting in touch with friends who work in that field. One thing that’s certain is that almost all will agree that they can’t get through a working week without using a computer. Depending on the job, it may be relatively simple things like typing a letter or receiving and responding to e-mails, through to more complex tasks such as analyzing data in spreadsheets and databases or producing charts and slides for presentations or reports. The vast majority of people will use the Microsoft Office suite of applications to complete these tasks. It’s therefore a very worthwhile exercise to make sure that your computer skills and knowledge of the current software version, is up to date.

Microsoft Office Applications

The Microsoft Office suite contains a number of applications which between them allow you to complete the tasks described above. The main applications are as follows;

Microsoft Word – a full-featured word processing program with rudimentary desktop publishing capabilities used to produce professional-looking documents.

Microsoft Outlook – a personal information manager used as a tool for managing contacts, e-mail, office notes and calendars.

Microsoft Excel – used to create and edit customised spreadsheets. Data is stored in rows and columns that can be organized and/or processed.

Microsoft PowerPoint – a presentation design package to allow you to create slide shows.

Microsoft Access – a desktop database application that allows large databases to be created, updated, searched and reported on by multiple users.

Microsoft Project – designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets and analyzing workloads.
Microsoft Office Training Courses

Training courses are readily available for each of the applications described above, either by taking online E-learning courses or by attending instructor-led training courses offered by certified companies. Leading Microsoft training companies offer courses on each program as often as twice a week with public schedule courses for popular programs such as Microsoft Excel being offered on a daily basis. Courses are generally split into Introduction, Intermediate and Advanced levels so, by starting at the introduction level you should not be left feeling that you are out of your depth. Instructor led courses follow a structured approach allowing skills to be built up gradually whilst ensuring all the main elements are covered.

Reading this article is the first step in deciding to help yourself get back to work. The next step is to get some