How can I get inbound/outbound call process?

What is the best way to get excel skills relevant to a workforce professional?

• So this is my first question to Quora after signing up and letting this account run fallow. Here is perhaps some clarification on this. For quite a number of years say about the last 10-15, I've been in the position more or less of wanting to get out of having to deal with public facing positions where I have to just deal with consumer stupidity and popularity contests. What i mean by that is that I want to get into a difficult business fyi business position but usually encountered unusual levels of stupidity or ridiculous requirements to do this. I really had my heart set on programming as my goal out of high school and attempted diligently to do so. During the course of this process life pretty much got in the way and the stark reality was that I was in the track to taking courses if busy work that never have me a single certifiable project that was applicable, relevant, or meaningful to what I wanted our a job. Adding to this I took another detour out of necessity and ran into a situation where it was possible to try to get into Workforce management a career. What made this interesting is that apparently for areas like simple phone contact centers this really boils down to being able work with "real world" data using elementary excel functions since the entities that use these systems run on the cheap and don't bother to use task programmers. I guess this is a roundabout way to explain that I'm not entirely sure how to try to get some kind of usable experience in processing data for a call center environment when there is a dearth of good instructional books about methodological approaches to what kind of data is actually collected (adherence, occupancy, service level, scorecards, etc). What made this even more infuriating is that one of my colleagues who had far less compost programming experience managed to become quite senior in this kind of basic excel data collection by apparently bs-ing his way through the process. I narrowly was declined for such a position because I "lacked call management experience" as well as the necessary tandem excel mechanics behind it. So chicken and the egg. No one publishes the exact data types that world be important. Excel is a glorified wimpy wannabe database that takes far far less than my knowledge of programming logic and math skills with calculus would be able to do any way. I probably can master virtually anything that is actually required the job before that would be needed to be used, however since there are many different facets to excel I can't realistically just learn random parts of excel and claim I know them. Why? Same issue with programming actually: lack of any realistic real world analysis and problems. No realistic data sets. No flipping idea which part of the program is needed. Finally no way to demonstrate that I know both. I have what I think is good job but not a career at all in the United States and appreciate that I have at least a point of stability and happiness but I crave more. I even tried to look into the trade association of workforce professionals. Unless I want to fork over the equivalent of a down payment for a car for one year getting admitted isn't going to happen to get what I need done. So to summarize: I need done high quality textbooks that are about using good old excel to manufacture information these people need about call center issues in at least a believable way that I can get my foot in the door to begin to advance and maybe get some real world experience. This was composed using an android phone and Swype so will appear disjointed so don't kill me.

• Answer:

  I would model a business.  There are tons of things people do with Excel.  One of the most common things is building models of various kinds. Model a business and flesh it out with a lot of detail.  Link the various parts of it with tables, formulas and values.  Take the output of it and display it in various graphs. Then vary the inputs.  Ask "what if?" questions.  What if sales go down?  How much cash is needed to operate during down times?  What does risk cost?  Given the business is one that involves product design, "what does a new product cost?" If that doesn't make sense, or you lack experiences and data, model something you do know, and build on that model, until it's flexible and capable of answering a lot of "what if?" scenarios.