For instance, some students may want to be investment pros, business consultants or sales managers without really knowing much about what those positions actually do. Take banking, for example. In a broad sense, we know bankers deal with financial transactions and detailed analyses of companies’ financial records — and that they typically make a lot of money. But what does that mean for their day-to-day work? Skill-wise, that means spending most of your waking hours using Microsoft Office applications: Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Even if you’re not pursuing a career as a banker or a consultant, these three tools can still be useful for your success. Just about any business needs to crunch numbers, present information and create reports for pertinent business activities. So if you want to have an edge over other candidates, you need to have a robust understanding of these tools.

Become a Microsoft Word wizard

If you’ve written even one college paper, you’re probably scoffing at the value of Word.

Sure, everyone knows simple commands like CTRL-C for cut, CTRL-V for paste, CTRL-B for bold and CTRL-I for italic. These basic copying and formatting shortcuts will certainly help you save time writing your paper for Psych 201. But shortcuts are not enough for workplace reports that require fancy layouts, crisp visual support and embedded charts.

The newest versions of Word are more than just simple word processors. Many advanced features will allow you to optimize layouts, streamline tables and use forms to create application-style documents. Word 2013 has a whole suite of new tools for design and collaboration, which can elevate your basic word processing skills to a whole new level.

Master Microsoft PowerPoint

If you’ve taken a business or communications class — or any other class that requires group projects and presentations — you’ve probably already made a PowerPoint presentation or two. At the basic level, this software application is easy to use. Putting together a simple slide show with a few bullet points is foolproof. But true PowerPoint pros don’t create a presentation one slide at time. They create master templates that can cleanly display different styles of data.

Once you’re out of the classroom, some professions take presentations to a whole new level. Management consultants (another sought-after job for graduates) use PowerPoint decks as a client deliverable. They pack each slide in these decks with information, charts and pictures.

Beyond the nuts and bolts of using PowerPoint, there are also YouTube tutorials such as the The Art of PowerPoint that teach you how to create your deck so your audience can easily view it and absorb the information. Font, chart size and layout are crucial factors.

Creating an optimized PowerPoint deck requires knowledge of advanced layout and editing features. Finally, there’s the non-technical portion of your presentation: the spoken component. Your beautiful presentation deck will fall short if delivered poorly, so your speaking skills are equally as important.

Extrapolate your own value with Microsoft Excel

Excel is the powerhouse of the bunch. Word and Powerpoint will help present your information nicely, but Excel will help you determine its value. No matter what business you’re in, Excel is a universal data analysis and decision-making support tool. Business, mathematics and engineering majors may have an edge over others in this skill, but getting started in Excel is easy.

At its simplest, you can use Excel to store data, do calculations and create charts. Those who play around with its more advanced features can do amazing things. Excel can give anybody the power to analyze and visually represent large sets of data. Doing that can sometimes be labor-intensive, but what separates an average Excel user from a pro is knowledge of keyboard shortcuts.

Another differentiator for Excel pros is their knowledge of macros and Pivot Tables. These features will help you interpret and effectively present a company’s most important metrics — a skill that can make you one of the most valuable employees in your organization.

Start preparing for the future now

You may have been wondering how Goldman Sachs and McKinsey make so much money. They certainly wouldn’t be successful without their use of Excel to read and interpret financial data. This gives them the ability to advise clients on how to invest their money and how they should invest the bank’s money.

Inside the high rise offices of big banks and consulting firms, new analysts and junior management consultants sit in front of their computers for up to 16 hours a day and move numbers around a spreadsheet, push them into charts and drop them into fancy Word documents and PowerPoint decks. Maybe that sounds less appealing than what characters do in Liar’s Poker or Showtime’s House of Lies. But it’s the truth when you’re starting out in these industries.

So keep in mind that many types of businesses highly value excellent Microsoft Office skills. Whether you want to come on board as a bank employee or join a startup, honing your skills in Word, PowerPoint and Excel will help you go far in your career and will equip you to create value for everyone. (Click here to Tweet this thought.)

Brad Zomick is Chief Content Officer at SkilledUp.com, a leading curator of online educational content, including over 80,000 online courses from over 300 providers in areas like Marketing, Graphic Design, Content Creation and more. Find online courses at SkilledUp.com to get skills and get ahead, and visit them on Facebook and Twitter.

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The post Upgrade Your Resume by Becoming a Microsoft Office Whiz appeared first on Brazen Life.

But there’s something his clients and colleagues don’t know (spoiler alert!): Don’s true identity is Dick Whitman, an orphan raised in a brothel, high school dropout, Korean war deserter and used car salesman. He’s an imposter.

While Don’s past is checkered, his position is impressive given that the 1960s Madison Avenue advertising community was an “old boy” network, many of whose members rose to prominence from well-to-do families and Ivy League pedigrees. These days, advertising is much more accepting of varied backgrounds, but a college degree is still a prerequisite.

Yet as more and more advertising turns digital, the skills and knowledge required are shifting too quickly for traditional colleges to keep up with. As a result, the best marketing education is now found online. And it’s much less expensive than a four-year diploma.

Follow this “curriculum” of high-quality online instruction to become a master of digital marketing and advertising:

General Studies 101: math, business and writing

To become a great marketer, the price of admission is a basic understanding of of math, business and English composition. Turn to the Khan Academy for online courses on arithmetic and probability and statistics. It also helps to have a foundational understanding of microeconomics and finance, particularly the modules on interest, debt and basic accounting.

Writing skills, such as achieving a readable writing style and strong grammar and punctuation, are an absolute necessity to writing copy that sells. Without these skills, you will be singled out as a weak writer. To brush up on your writing, a good starting point is Duke’s English Composition I course on Coursera. If you don’t want to work on a typical college schedule, some good self-paced alternatives include the “Cleaning Your Copy” course from Poynter’s New University and Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips.

Although it’s easy to complain about standardized tests, much of the foundational knowledge required for marketing is found on the SAT and can be gained with the same preparation with these high-quality free online courses.

Core curriculum: online marketing

Once you’re confident in your foundation in writing, math and business concepts, you can move on to the fun stuff! The HubSpot Academy is a great place for a free primer in online marketing, and upon completion, you’ll receive an official HubSpot certification. Another solid free resource is Inbound.org, a Reddit-style site for marketing-related articles. The best articles are upvoted and organized so you don’t have to go searching.

If you’re willing to pay for premium online marketing content, the first stop is MarketingProfs, a broad, high-quality content library with videos, PDF guides, webinars and more. They cover all variety of online and offline marketing, and they also offer a substantial amount of free content.

As you move to more advanced topics, you’ll want to look into certain niches like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with DistilledU, public relations with Mediabistro, social media with Hootsuite U, affiliate marketing with Fizzle.co or content marketing with CopyBlogger.

The Electives

If you decide to take the solopreneur route, it’s critical to have an understanding of how to do different roles—even if you plan on outsourcing or hiring others to fulfill some of the tasks that aren’t your strengths. You’ll want to have cursory knowledge of image editing, data analysis tools such as Microsoft Excel and general business skills.

It also helps to have a basic understanding of front-end Web technologies that determine how websites look and feel. After all, if you want to test what color or text to use on a key button, it helps if you can make that change yourself instead of waiting for a developer. Front-end development consists of HTML, CSS and JavaScript—the primary building blocks of your website. You can learn the basics for free at Codeacademy, and when you’re ready to step it up a notch, you can consider learning libraries like Treehouse and lynda.com.

Adobe Photoshop is the most popular program for basic image editing and is worth spending a little time learning. Udemy has a free Photoshop primer, and if you’re looking to advance your skills, consider Skillfeed, which offers a variety of Photoshop and design courses online.

Excel is an indispensable tool for marketing analytics. There are a lot of free Excel tutorials on the Internet, but paid courses like Excel With Business and Filtered provide adaptive skills testing and high-quality training. Finally, some business courses such as the 60-Day MBA can help you fill in the holes in your business knowledge for far less money and time than the traditional two-year MBA.

Laboratory practicum

While marketing courses in college are more theoretical, learning online marketing requires real-world action and experimentation. To setup your “laboratory,” you’ll need a website to play around with. WordPress is free and easy to set up, so it’s a good place to start building your site.

If your site has an e-commerce component, check out Shopify. From there, you can experiment with different forms of content, blogging, copywriting and SEO. To tinker in social media, you can always use your own Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts, but it’s a better idea to create separate pages or profiles for your blog or website.

You can use Google Analytics to see what content and social media channels are performing well. Try many of the tips that Fizzle, CopyBlogger, MarketingProfs and HubSpot recommend. The most important step is to document and capture data on everything, both for your own learning as well as your ability to communicate to employers what you have learned.

Take pictures, store your analytics and use portfolio sites like Accredbile and Pathbrite (both free) to showcase your work and demonstrate your skills to prospective employers. If you have a novel idea or product, you may even be able skip the job interviews and become your own boss.

The modern-day Mad Men are coming

If you bought all of the monthly services above (including website hosting), the cost would run less than $3,000 per year, and you’d have enough content to fill your entire day, nearly every day. Compare that to the average college tuition cost (now $22,421 a year), and the fact that a standard marketing curriculum is often obsolete by the time you finish it, and it’s clear that learning marketing online offers a compelling alternative.

And, perhaps more importantly, learning online means you’ll be experimenting, testing as you go and building a track record (perhaps of failures, but that doesn’t matter so much). This track record and your ability to show a potential employer what you’ve done will make you as valuable (or more so) than a typical marketing school graduate.

It takes real focus and more than a little effort, but in today’s world, skipping college and becoming a Don Draper is more plausible than ever—and you don’t need to create a fake identity to do it.

Brad Zomick works at SkilledUp.com, a leading curator of online educational content, including over 80,000 online courses from over 300 providers available in areas like Programming, Graphic Design, Content Creation, Marketing and more. Find online courses at SkilledUp.com to get skills and get ahead, and visit them on Facebook and Twitter.

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The post Teach Yourself These Skills to Become a Master of Online Marketing appeared first on Brazen Life.

One key feature of lifestyle design is the ability to choose where you work, and since the concept was popularized, droves of people have packed up their desks, handed in pink slips and set sail to new and exciting destinations. What’s more brazen than quitting that job you’ve hated for years and pursuing one you love that can be carried out from anywhere in the world?

The careers below will set you free from your shoe-box-size apartment and allow you to work from either the beaches of Mexico and Thailand or the mountains of Nepal and Peru. All you need is to become skilled in these fields, pack up your computer, and you too can be on your way.

1. Web and Graphic Design

It helps to have a natural talent in sketching and drawing, but these days, many designers have traded in their sketchbooks for a copy of Adobe Photoshop and Web tools like HTML, CSS and PHP, which are crucial in implementing the stylistic vision for a website.

If you’re the creative type and love to learn new things, then you can either master Photoshop design techniques or Web development languages and start creating designs from a glacier in Alaska.

One case in point who is living out his own fantasy is Mirko Humbert, a Swiss Web and graphic designer. He was trained in Lausanne, Switzerland, and has been freelancing for seven years. While most of his customer base is based in Europe, he lives out his days in Dali, a sleepy little town in the southwest of China.

Working Abroad Tip #1: Explore your bank’s international banking fee structures. Some have partnerships with local banks. For instance, China Construction Bank and Bank of America have a partnership where all ATM fees are waived, saving your hard-earned dollars. Citi and HSBC have good international coverage, but you should still confirm with your branch as account types vary widely. You may want to open different accounts for use in different countries.

2. Digital Marketing

Are you in traditional marketing or public relations and tired of your desk job in the concrete jungle? The good news is that while you were sleeping, there was a digital revolution, and much of marketing has moved to the Internet. If you can master online marketing skills like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media, you’ll soon be able to free yourself from your corporate shackles.

There’s no better example of a marketer on the road than Sean Ogle. After graduating from college, he slaved away at an office job in Portland for two years. When he couldn’t take it any longer, he up and quit his job, moved to Thailand, learned SEO and started his own consulting firm.

Working Abroad Tip #2: Explore your communication options. Computer and smartphone apps like Google Voice, Skype, WhatsApp and WeChat can help you communicate with clients, friends and family around the world for free. Use an app like Speedtest (iOS) to test the Internet connection so you know clients can hear you properly.

If you’re in a country that censors the Internet, consider purchasing a virtual proxy service that masks your IP address and allows you to surf the Web unhindered. Unlock your smartphone or buy a GSM phone so you can pop in a new SIM card in each country you visit.

3. Photography

Got one of those awesome digital SLR cameras for Christmas last year and love taking photos, but never have a chance to use it because you’re too busy? Fancy cameras can be hard to figure out, but once you’ve mastered how to use them, you can take some really stunning photos. And if you have a knack for photography, there are a lot of career options beyond the borders of the United States.

All the photos you see of foreign destinations in newspapers, magazines and online all came from somewhere. But you don’t have to be a photojournalist to get those jobs. Take Jeremiah Thompson, a normal guy from Montana, who took the plunge into photography and international life on a surfing trip and is now a bikini model photographer in Brazil. There’s also the story of Kyle Hepp, an American expat based in Chile. She was passionate about photography but never thought of it as a business—until it ended up becoming her career. Now she’s called upon to travel around the world to shoot weddings.

Working Abroad Tip #3: Consider looking into a virtual assistant service like Get Friday or Brickwork, which will allow your clients to have uninterrupted service while you’re on the road or there’s a significant gap in time zones. Speaking of time zones, invest in a watch with multiple time zones, or add apps to your computer and mobile device that display the time across the multiple time zones where your clients and assistants work, ensuring you’ll stay in sync with the rest of your team.

4. Writing

Did you ever imagine yourself living like a modern-day Ernest Hemingway, sipping cocktails near the beach in Key West or Cuba? It doesn’t have to be a pipe dream! If you have an English degree or natural writing skills going to waste, with a refresher, you could be out discovering the world and writing about it.

The obvious choices would be journalism or travel writing. Yes, it would be cool to work for the Associated Press in Johannesburg, South Africa, or troll travel destinations with Lonely Planet, but why not just write your own book? That’s what Chris Guillebeau did. In fact, he published not one, but three books, all while traveling around the world!

Working Abroad Tip #4: Work the frequent flyer mile system with Flyer Talk and Travel Hacking Cartel (also by Chris Guilleabeau). These websites are devoted to hacking the flyer miles system and can help you rack up miles you wouldn’t have known about, enabling you to travel for free.

If you’re sick and tired of being a cog in the corporate machine, remember: it doesn’t have to be that way. The world around us is changing, and much of the work we do does not need to happen from a desk in a 30-story skyscraper. Throw out the office politics and jump off that corporate ladder you’re climbing, because there are real career options that will allow you to work from a different country every month. Give yourself a little lifestyle redesign, and soon you, too, can be location independent!

Have you found a career that allows you to work from anywhere? Tell us about it in the comments!

Brad Zomick works at SkilledUp.com, the leading source of reviews, ratings and deals on online courses, with over 50,000 courses from over 200 providers available in every subject. Find online courses at SkilledUp.com to get skills and get ahead, and visit them on Facebook and Twitter.

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