Advanced Excel required in a school SENCO Admin role

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I’d like to apply for a p/t SENCO Exams Administrator role which is basically to gather all evidence and documentation for pupils to have adjustments for their exams.

The job spec states Advanced Excel required but Excel has always been a big problem for me - I used it constantly daily in my job before I became a SAHM but my ability was always just about at Intermediate level. Pivot tables and anything beyond a basic formula is beyond me - instructions just go in one ear and out the other, plus it didn’t help that these were rarely required either so no regular experience using them.

But I just know I can never be an Advanced user, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. DH works in education (senior management) and thinks they’ve just ticked a box and the role won’t require Advanced knowledge.

I’m going to start doing online refresher courses for all Microsoft Office anyway, but I’m not sure what to do with regards this job. I just know I simply can’t say I’ll get up to speed once shown and with regular use - it’s like I become spectacularly thick when it comes to formulas and Pivot etc, but I fit the job spec for everything else.

First and foremost apply anyway, don't rule yourself out just because your excel is a bit iffy.

I agree with PP definitely apply, and if you get an interview they will probably go through what you need to be able to do in Excel.
Personally I find with excel the more you use it the better you get. There are many great YouTube videos on the different aspects of excel, which I have found really useful.
Good luck!

Apply. People's ideas of what 'Advanced Excel' is varies hugely.

I’d be fairly advanced at excel (VBA, macros etc) and usually find when someone says advanced they’re advanced beginners. There’s a great YouTube channel - I think it’s mrexcel - that I learned a lot through when I needed to sharpen up my excel skills in a hurry a few years ago after changing jobs.

I work in a school at a fairly senior level & I doubt that more than one person would know how to use pivot tables. We are thankful if staff can fill in a spreadsheet!

Obviously every school is different but I would definitely apply.

I used to be an Exams Officer, and routinely used Excel. I wouldn’t call it advanced level, though. It was mostly preparing exams registers, mark sheets for internal tests, downloading the data from external boards and creating reports amongst other things. I can’t recall using macros, lookups or pivots. I think you’ll be fine. Be prepared, though, it’s a hard job with extremely busy periods that can be very stressful, and then really quiet times in between.

Good luck!

Make your application, if you refer to excel then say that you have x years experience of using it etc

I’m an ‘advanced’ user of excel and have been using it for at least 30 years. I have been using Office 365 for the last few years, so my ‘extensive’ experience and ‘advanced’ skills can mean a school child might know the ‘new’ feature embedded in Excel that I’ve had a workaround for decades whilst that feature didn’t exist.

I regularly jump onto google for ideas to solve a problem or to see if there’s a better way.

I think advanced Excel is a bit too woolly a term... What exactly is advanced? What I think of as advanced and what someone else things is likely to be significantly different. One of my colleagues thinks I'm an advanced user as I knew how to work the formula function on excel (thank you GCSE IT!), however my husband does pivot tables on there for a living which I know nothing about.

I did read an interesting article ages ago about a study in to make and female job applications. The finding were that if a man hit say 4 of the 7 "essential" criteria he would apply, but a women would only apply if she hit all 7.

I would class myself as advanced at excel - I can do the basics and there’s google for anything tricky.

Apply, class yourself as advanced in your application and then at interview say you’ve been taking some refresher courses as you’ve been out of the workforce for a while.

I think if they've asked for advanced excel you'll likely be responsible for preparing and analysis progress data etc, which does require better excel than a simple adding up spreadsheet, but I agree people's definition of advanced excel varies.

Don’t let it put you off, but it is worth getting to grips with things like pivot tables if you’re going to be managing data. DH’s SLT role often involved data e.g. results, attendance etc. and he’d end up typing numbers from excel cells into a calculator and wasting so much time presenting data in different ways that pivot tables or lookups would have sorted in 30 seconds. Such a monumental waste of time and easily solved.

Excel is really intuitive when it’s something you use regularly, it sounds like the problem before has been that you were only using it sporadically.

Agree you should apply because 'advanced' feels like how long is a piece of string. I'm probably average in my workplace, using it daily, but compared to my civil servant DH who barley uses it, I'm a genius.

I don't consider myself advanced at Excel at all but I have been in a job (ironically in a SEND department in a school) where the upkeep of the communal spreadsheets fell to me as no one else could do anything beyond the absolute basic. Eg we had to type text in cells, and they could manage that but if someone wrote a lot no one but I was capable of making the cells bigger or the font smaller so that all the information could be seen when printed. I was regarded as something of an Excel genius for being able to do this.

Definitely apply!

I'm an EO.

I use the excel I learnt while in banking 15 years ago. Never done a pivot or a macro in my life! I need to do tables, timetables, seating plans etc.

School administrator here...I use Excel all the time and have no idea what a pivot table is!

For my role it's mainly a case of being able to export data from SIMS and manipulate it within spreadsheets without losing accuracy.

On the rare occasions I've needed to do anything more complicated I've figured it out in minutes with Google or excel.friend on TikTok.

If it's for one school I guess a percentage of DC would be Senco and each would have a number of exams. But it wouldn't be huge amounts of data that would require pivot tables and advanced formulae. Go for it and if you get an interview, ask them what functions they need.

They probably have no clue of the extent of what Excel can do and so have said “advanced” but don’t mean it.

I would consider pivot tables maybe medium knowledge, though I generally dislike them and won’t use them! That’s job specific though.

I would definitely apply and just state your years of excel experience. If they need you to have a particular skill they could test you.

Offer to go on a course and say practice makes perfect - they can't argue with that!

Also those pupils with SEN are identified on SIMS and then you export their timetables v easily to excel.

Honestly I'm terrible with tech and have managed fine for 5 years

I was reading that apparently women see something like that on a JD and generally rule themselves out immediately. Men generally shrug and decide it doesn't matter. Go for it!

I agree with the PP who said 'advanced' can mean many things. I can do pivot tables, linked dashboards, slicers, macros and power BI. There are also a lot of things I can't do. It all depends on what needs to be done as part of the role.

Thanks for all the comments - I applied and have an interview next week!

I feel a bit better now about the Excel side of things but I’m signing up for an Office course that supposedly gets you up to Intermediate level. The interview and walk around to meet staff is 3 hours long so I do wonder if they will get me to do an IT test. With all the will in the world and practice I won’t be an Excel whizz by next week!

It’s so true that women are more cautious about applying for jobs if they feel they don’t meet 100% of the requirements.

A lot of this Excel stuff really isn't that difficult and there are so many excellent tutorials available online. I did have some specialist Excel training, but that didn't teach me everything I now know. It did however give me the skills to be able to access the more advanced online tutorials and make them work for me.