HR: Teaching Just Excel Skills Keeps Productivity Low—Here’s Why
Excel users regain recognition and energy when drudgework disappears and their insights fuel confident executive decisions.
SUMMARY: Many companies are shifting to skills-based hiring and learning—but when it comes to Excel, this approach deepens the problem. Teaching only Excel skills reinforces burnout and low productivity. The solution isn’t more Excel skills—it’s a systematic, all-Excel method of processing data in Excel, with help from ChatGPT. HR can lead the transformation by encouraging Excel users to learn Excel as a system, not as a set of individual tasks. Here’s an introduction to the new strategy. And here’s how to join the EDP Institute.
If you only offer traditional training in Excel skills, you’re not fixing the real Excel problem—you’re funding it.
Historically, companies have hired professionals for their domain expertise—finance, accounting, operations, marketing—and then taught them more Excel skills on the job.
Now, many companies are shifting to skills-based hiring—which can include hiring people who already know Excel well.
But concentrating only on Excel skills has led to manual updating of Excel reports. Strict deadlines. High pressure. Low self-efficacy. Burnout. And extremely low productivity in one of the most important tools in business.
Adding more people with traditional Excel skills doesn’t remove the root cause of the drudgework. It just embeds it deeper.
The solution? Companies need to train for Excel core competencies—not just core skills.
Let’s look more closely at what that means. And what your HR team might do about it.
Core Skills vs. Core Competencies
Core skills are the foundational abilities that help people do their jobs. Think VLOOKUP, sorting, and PivotTables. These are task-level skills. They can be learned in hours or days. They’re useful. And they’re used everywhere.
Core competencies are different. They aren’t just skills. They’re powerful combinations of skill, insight, process, mindset, and team behavior. They’re hard to copy. But they give a team or company a sustainable advantage.
Skills help you move. Competencies help you win.
Here’s the key point: Learning Excel formulas doesn’t create a core competency. But the right combination of Excel skills and workflows can.
Why Typical Excel Training Falls Short
Most Excel classes are tactical. They focus on shortcuts, tips, and tools. But they rarely change how people use Excel month to month. They don’t eliminate the manual work. They don’t increase speed, consistency, or insight.
That’s a problem. Because without a big change in how people work with Excel, you won’t see a big improvement in their productivity, error rate, or delivered results.
Imagine a team that learns additional Excel skills. They learn ten new features. But when they return to work, they open the same old spreadsheets, copy and paste new data, tweak some numbers, use some keyboard shortcuts, and send their reports.
Nothing changed. Not really. And that’s a significant problem, for at least two reasons. First, managers aren’t getting the insights they need.
And second, the opportunity cost of doing Excel drudgework runs to tens of thousands of dollars per month, per employee.
A Strategy That Changes Everything
Now let’s flip the script.
Instead of teaching random features, imagine upskilling your Excel users. Teach them a core competency: a productive Excel strategy to structure their work in a way that unlocks automation, consistency, speed, innovation, and accuracy.
That’s what the Excel Data Plumbing Institute (EDP) does.
EDP is a new way of working in Excel. It teaches users to flow data—like water—from source systems, through a few data-cleaning steps, into automated reports, dashboards, forecasts, and other Excel work. This approach eliminates most manual work with Excel. And it creates outputs that are accurate, timely, and easy to reuse.
The EDP strategy also includes the use of ChatGPT and Copilot. These tools act as always-available mentors. They help users fill knowledge gaps, learn Excel faster, and get instant feedback. More than that, they help with research, strategic thinking, and even data storytelling. Whether it’s finding new data sources or crafting a narrative around the numbers, AI tools expand what Excel users can do.
This isn’t about functions or formatting. It’s about transforming Excel from a drudgework tool into a strategic advantage.
How EDP Bridges Skills and Competencies
With EDP, Excel users don’t just learn a few new tools. They learn to think differently. They learn to design their workbooks as reusable systems. They learn to automate updates. They learn to explain results.
Here are a few examples:
- Instead of spending hours updating a report every month, users set up flowbooks that they can refresh each period with one command.
- Instead of building static charts, users build dashboards and financials that respond to slicers and filters. That lets them explore their data interactively.
- Instead of presenting merely internal data, users add context to their output—like economic and industry data—which they also can update with one command. That helps them to explain not only what happened, but why.
Each of these steps requires a few new skills. But together, they form a competency: the ability to deliver fast, flexible, and accurate insight on demand.
Why This Matters for HR
When you invest in core competencies, you unlock exponential gains.
A single EDP-trained analyst can produce many reports for multiple managers. Or support strategy sessions with up-to-the-minute dashboards. Or to display internal performance in the context of external trends to surface insights no one else is seeing.
They become more than a report generator. They become a strategic resource.
That’s the kind of transformation companies need.
Bonus: More Meaningful Work
EDP doesn’t just benefit the company. It benefits the employees, too.
Most Excel users are stuck doing repetitive work under tight deadlines. They’re burned out. They spend more time cleaning data than analyzing it.
The EDP Strategy changes that. It gives them time for deeper thinking, better analysis, and more satisfying contributions. They get to work on projects that stretch their abilities and support their growth. They produce results that matter!
That’s what McKinsey’s surveys tell us workers want: work that matters.
And that’s exactly what EDP gives them.
Your Next Step
Excel doesn’t have to be a source of drudgework and stress. It can be a platform for speed, insight, and growth.
But that won’t happen by training more Excel skills.
It will happen when HR helps build core competencies that reshape how Excel is used across the company—starting now.
Help your Excel users and middle managers to learn about the EDP Institute.
