How to Pick Employable Skills - Ep.14

Ryan: Aloha guys, and welcome back to degree free. We are your hosts, Ryan, and Hannah Maruyama on this podcast. We share fundamentals we've discovered and the mistakes we've made while self-educating, getting work, building businesses and making money. We'll tell you how to make it happen. No degree needed

Hannah: Aloha guys, and welcome back to degree free Ryan and I are super happy to have you today.

If you found something useful in a past episode, or you find this episode extremely useful, please do feel free to check out our website, which is degreefreenetwork.com on there. We have all the transcript of the blog posts, and not only that we have our guide. Our guide is going to tell you how to go about getting a job without a college degree.

It's going to teach you how to apply, what you can do to improve your resume. It can also teach you how to find valuable skills and what I use to get my job without a college degree. So, welcome back again, like, and subscribe if you haven't, so you don't miss anything and let's get into today's episode.

Ryan: All right. So let's get into it. So today we're going to be talking about. How to pick employable skills. This is something that we come across a lot and it has to do with everybody that we're speaking to. A lot of people think that they don't have any skills. Okay. Not only do they not have any skills, but then they're like, how do I identify the skills to learn or which skills to learn first, there's an endless amount of skills to be had.

And everyone's like, well, I want to work in this industry. I want to do this job. What should I learn in order to break into the industry? And so today that's kind of what we're gonna be talking about. Not so much how to learn it, but just how to identify the skills that you might need in order to get yourself prepared for the job interview or at least get the skills that you would need to do the job, or at least to show to somebody on your resume that you've done this work and attain this proficiency. In order to at least get a job interview.

Hannah: Yeah. A lot of people we have a, we have an epidemic of self elimination in people who are applying for jobs.

People will ruthlessly weed themselves out from applying for jobs that they don't match every bullet point in the job description. This happens a lot. And so what I get, when I get on TikTok a lot is people asking what, what can I do? Like what, what skill should I pick? You know, how do I, like, how do I pick?

And I didn't realize it until I started getting asked this question. But I remembered after, after I started seeing it a lot, I remembered what I felt like when I was like, shoot, I need to get, I need to get something. I need to learn something useful. And I was just like, how do I, how do I find something useful?

You know, how do you weed through it? And I think that when we've talked about it in past episodes where we've talked about people needing to go through job descriptions and actually read them and see what's in the job description, but once you've done that, and you've got a list of like 10 things that you're like, okay, I see this acronym here, or I see this, whatever this software is here or I see that they want me to know how to use PowerPoint or Excel. And, I realize a lot of our podcast if we had a dollar for every time, I was like, well, learn Excel, you know, learn Excel. But really though and the reason for this is because a lot of people are they're under the misconception that the college is telling you what you need to know to do work.

But they're not. You know, the college is not the company and the college is not the company that's going to employ you specifically. So how are they supposed to know what the company that you are going to work for need you to know how. They can't. There's no way for them to know that, and college degrees are so general in comparison to how granular a job may be, that they cannot really effectively tell you what proficiencies you need to have.

Only the job can tell you that, and if you're looking for a job in a specific industry, or you're trying to get a specific position at a specific company, only that company can tell you what it is you need to know to do that work.

Ryan: Yep. Absolutely. I agree. I think what's interesting is I wonder if—I'm justkind of going on a tangent here and I wonder if college used to do, that right? I wonder if you came out of college and you were ready to bang.

Hannah: Jobs are more general.

Ryan: That's what I was just, that's what I was thinking. I was just thinking about that. I was thinking with the proliferation of technology jobs are becoming like hyper-specific.

Like and I think that's an ongoing debate of what's more valuable, somebody that's hyper-specific or somebody that's a generalist.

Hannah: What a lot of these companies are doing is they're getting these younger kids, you know, the ones that should be going to college by all accounts. And they're saying like, here come work for us.

And then they're promising to pay their tuition, to buy them college degrees on the backend, which makes sense. Because the thing is one, they might, a lot of them might not use it. If they stay long enough, they're gonna, they're going to move up, right? If they stay and they work hard, they're going to move up.

That's just how it's going to work. And so some of them might end up getting their college paid for by the company that they work for as an investment, into their future. Right. It's different there because the kid is not the one paying for the. The company is, which makes sense. Really. Because the company should be the one who tells you, oh, okay. Well, you know, if you want to get a degree, then we'll give you a raise to here, but we'll pay for it. All right. Fair enough. This kid's cashflow positive. So who cares? Right? What difference does it make? But the thing is, they're going to learn work first and they're going to learn to work in their specific department.

So you're going to have somebody who works in the deli at Walmart, and they're going to have hyper-specific knowledge about the deli and Walmart, and then they're going to go get whatever, you know, hospitality, whatever degree they're going to get. You know what I mean? And so that's different than the, by this general degree here, and then hope that something in there is relevant to the job that you're actually going to get after four to six years of doing that, you know?

Ryan: Yeah. So I see what you're saying, and this is basically what we've been saying from the beginning, which is going to college first is basically putting the cart before the horse. If later on, if you want to get a college degree and it makes sense to economically and there's a good reason to later on, do it later, do it afterwards.

I guess it's something that we have to explore about whether or not it pays to be a generalist or or have a specific skillset, you know, I think it just depends. I think there are different criteria, whereas like if you work in a smaller company, this is generally speaking, if you work in a smaller company, you're going to wear more hats, right?

I, mean, they're. Just as much to do as if you run a big company, maybe not quite as much because there's not as much revenue. There is not as much most people. But everything still needs to get done. Marketing, sales, accounting, you know, HR, whatever, and then whatever, making the product or providing the service, whatever it is.

So you're going to wear more hats and sometimes it pays to be more of a generalist in those areas, and I think if you work at a bigger company, generally speaking, you know, a lot of times you're just going to do one specific thing, right? Here's your one specific thing, but this is all you do. You know, you code like the interface.

But like the interface of this mobile app, like that's all you do.

Hannah: You're backend engineer of the shopping cart. Part of the app.

Ryan: Yeah. Like that's all you do and you don't do anything else. And so that's just generally speaking, but I think that that's why this is important. That's why being able to identify which skill, which skills to pick based off of what you want to do.

You know, I think a lot of it is just being able to figure out, and we talked about this before. Figure out which you want to do–

Hannah: Also when we say what you want to do, what you want to do can just be making money. That's fine.

Ryan: That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I was just about to say that, figure out how much money you want to make, figure out if you want to work in a certain industry, figured out if you want to work inside, outside.

And we've talked about this before, you know. Okay. Now the broader you keep it, the more things you're going to be looking at, right? Might be more difficult to pin things down, might be a lot easier. So what I mean by that is like, okay, I need to, I want to make a hundred thousand dollars and I want to work indoors.

Now that can be, that's super broad.

Hannah: That's a lot of things.

Ryan: That's a lot. That's everything. That's literally everything. Okay. Maybe one of those skills that you're going to be looking at, so you're gonna be looking at pretty much everything under the sun. They really pretty much every job application under the sun.

I hear we going through it and it might be that something sticks out that you see on it. You know, my suggestion and it's super boring and it really blows.

But my suggestion is to. Use some sort of–

Hannah: Don't say it.

Ryan: Data analysis

Hannah: Oh. Spreadsheet. Make a spreadsheet, people.

Ryan: They would probably be easiest. To sort it in the spreadsheet.

Hannah: Ryan loves spreadsheets.

Ryan: It's probably easiest to sort it in a spreadsheet.

Hannah: Well, okay. I've got to make a joke, but it was going to be, it was going to be about math and I'm not going to do it.

Basically though. What's also funny about that is that, you want to know— I realized that we've not been super specific for people that are listening to this to get an actual answer to this question. No, we're just, we're just goofing around, but seriously though a good way, the way to find it is look at aggregate in the spreadsheet.

It's not fun guys. I'm sorry, but this is just what you going to do. You can use a notepad if you want. I use a notepad because I'm a hold out on spreadsheets, but spreadsheets are easier. So use a spreadsheet if you want. Right, you know, list down five different jobs. And then in, in those, you know, in the columns, put the different skills, there's bullet points, put the bullet points in each column that you see that the job description is asking for, and see what thing is repeating the most? I guarantee you for most white collar office jobs, they're going to want you to know how to use Excel. They are going to say Excel, and then they are going to say pivot tables.

Those are the two things. If you know how to do those things, you are pretty much worth your weight in gold to a company. I just want people to understand and Excel is a free thing. If you don't have a computer, if you don't have internet, you can go sit your butt in a library and use YouTube to teach yourself Excel at a library for free.

Ryan: Yeah. Like the first point is finding skills backwards. Right? So like it's better for you than we're talking about. Go to the job descriptions, go to the companies. Basically we're saying go to the companies, find out what skills that they're asking for you to know, and then organize that in some fashion, ideally, it'd be something very easy to compile and sort through the data, something similar to—but it doesn't have to be a spreadsheet.

Hannah: Spreadsheet, optional.

Ryan: Spreadsheet is optional. You can use it, you can do it. You can do a word doc. You could pen and paper. That's fine.

Hannah: There's two types of people in the world.

Ryan: Whatever's easiest for you, but it's got to get done.

All right. So you're gonna find the skills backwards, and then you're going to go through these skills and then, you know, five to ten of these jobs is probably plenty.

Hannah: That's more than you need because you know what, you're going to narrow it down. Cause if you're looking for, at this point, if you're looking at job titles to the point where you're picking jobs, you don't need that many because you're now you're in the, at least the genre of job that you're trying to get.

Ryan: Yeah. So five to 10 is plenty.

Hannah: Yeah.

Ryan: That's not a lot. Okay. Do that. Now, something's sticking out at you.

Hannah: So I want to make an example of this really quick. So if you were trying to get a job as as an office administrator, you would find five office administrator slash office manager, reception roles. You would put five of those roles into a spreadsheet or on a notepad, and you would then see which skill is most often repeated because there will be overlap in those job descriptions.

There will be. Because most jobs are really close to each other. They're not, there's not that many unique jobs. They are mostly all pretty much the same, especially when you get to like white collar. When you get to white collar work, they're all the same.

Ryan: Yeah. I think there's a couple of things here is that it would make sense if you were to look at these job descriptions and see which one of these comes up most often.

Also which one of these is the easiest to learn in the shortest amount of time.

Hannah: Or with the least amount of money.

Ryan: With the least amount of money, but also going to have the greatest impact, right?

Hannah: That's why we're saying Excel, because it's, it's high—if you can harp on your Excel proficiency and you can teach it to yourself relatively quickly, which most people can, because it's really not that as much as I don't like it.

It's not that complicated.

Ryan: So, I have an Excel story. I have an Excel, a story for later, but I do want to say the second thing, which is once you identify that skill, it could be Excel. It could be a proficiency at another like a CRM. It could be a proficiency. It could be a proficiency–

Hannah: Familiary with email marketing.

Ryan: Right? Exactly.

Hannah: You know how to do Facebook ads?

Ryan: Right. Facebook ads, Google ads.

Hannah: You know how to post on Instagram and write captions.

Ryan: Exactly. Or, and, you know how to schedule out social media posts, you know how to engage with social media, you know how to create a YouTube channel, create and market a YouTube channel.

It could be something, it can be anything, it can be anything, but once you figure out what that is, my suggestion is that you learn it. For some people. It's going to be very difficult, and I'm not saying that you're going to love it. You have to kind of be willing at this point to learn things that are useful and not things that you necessarily love.

Hannah: That lights your fire for lack of a better term.

Ryan: Right.

Hannah: Because I'm sorry, babe. Nobody's ever no one's ever had a fire lit by Excel spreadsheets.

Ryan: I agree. I agree.

Hannah: For reference, Ryan makes a lot of spreadsheets and I make more now than I used to, which was zero.

Ryan: Yes. I agree.

Excel spreadsheets. That's a perfect example of something that's very—it's not easy to learn, actually.

It's simple.

It's simple to learn, to learn. To be proficient enough in it probably takes if you know nothing about Excel spreadsheets, if you know nothing about how long do you think it takes to be proficient enough.

Okay. So let me tell you a story form.

Hannah: Please.

Ryan: So, a little while ago, we had a, I had a childhood friend visit. He's an engineer. Hopefully he's listening to this. And shout out, you know who you are. And I picked him up and we went to go eat lunch and we were talking and we don't see each other very often.

We're kind of talking about stuff and he was just talking, he's now a senior engineer at a big company.

Hannah: Like you'd know the name of the company. Yeah.

Ryan: He's a senior engineer at one of these companies and we're talking and he's just like, man, these engineers that are coming in, like these new engineers right out of college that are coming in off the street.

There's like, they don't even know Excel. And I was like, oh man, that sucks. Like that's crazy. Cause I was talking about his job. His job was interesting. Engineering is interesting. And I was like, Aw, man, that sucks. Like what? Like they, what are they, what are they struggling with? And I say they're like, there they're like they don't, they don't know functions or something like that.

They, they can't do like simple, like logistical, like I dunno, coding or whatever it is. I dunno, this shows you how much I paid attention in college because I took an Excel course that I literally slept through the entire time.

And here I am. It was very refreshing. I was bartending at the time.

So, it was first class in the morning on like Tuesdays, Thursdays at like eight o'clock why you would put like an advanced Excel spreadsheet class at eight o'clock in the morning or whatever it is.

Hannah: That's bold. Very bold.

Ryan: And I was like, and I was bartending. So wake up and I was super tired.

Hannah: Probably not completely sober at that point.

Ryan: Probably not.

But anyway. So I didn't learn much in that class. Unfortunately.

Hannah: I'm shocked.

Ryan: Yeah. Which I wish I'd paid more attention, but anyway, so I'm like, oh, so what, like, what are they struggling with? Like what, what don't they know? Like simple functions, logistical modeling or something like that, and he's just like, oh no, he's like more basic than that.

I was like, What do you mean? Like they don't know how to do pivot tables or something like that. I don't know how to do charts and just like. No, no, no, basically not. What do you mean? He's like, you know, that square in the bottom corner that you're like that, that turns black and then you like put a curse over and it's like and you go like one, two in the first two in the first two rows.

And then the little square, you highlight it and then little square pops up with a plus sign. And when you drag it down, it was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, however long you continue it and you can continue a function like that, or continue with date, any dataset, you can continue it like that. And he's just like, I was like, yeah.

And he's like, yeah, I have to like, teach them what that is. And I'm like, what? Like, these are, these are engineers and I mean, these are engineers. In that. Okay. I'll take that back there. They're engineers because they work–

Hannah: They pass through. Yeah.

Ryan: They work. They work as engineers. They're engineers.

I'm going to take that away. So don't mean it like that they are engineers.

Hannah: They don't have a core competency that engineers need.

Ryan: Right. And I was like

Hannah: And I'm not exaggerating, core competency.

Ryan: So that's why, that's why I spoke with him about it. And as for those listening, I am more proficient at Excel than that. Well, but I didn't learn in college actually, even though I took that Excel class.

Hannah: Yeah you learned it later when you needed it.

Ryan: I learned it later when I was, when I was an accountant. You know what I mean? I needed it then, you know what I mean? I was like, how often are you guys looking at spreadsheets It's like, I dunno, a hundred times a day, a hundred times a day.

Hannah: Also not a lot.

Ryan: I was like, whoa. I was like, that's a, that seems like a really rudimentary skill for them to know. What I mean just auto-fill. And I was like, okay. So would that story being said, if there are entry-level engineers and then I asked him, and then my follow up question, because he knows that I do this and we do this. And I was like, do you think, do you think that these engineers, do you think that they need the degree?

Do you think a degree was necessary for them to get this job? And I'm like, oh, is it, is it necessary for them? Like, do you think that they're better at their job because they're engineers? Do you have any coworkers that don't have degrees that are engineers. He said I was surprised because he did go to college.

Hannah: Yes, he did. He's very, he's very papered.

Ryan: Yeah. Very, yeah. He did go to college he's very academically smart. Works very hard.

Hannah: He worked his butt off.

Ryan: And and he's just like, you know, honestly, I don't really think that you need to go to college in order to do my job, you know, I'm just like, all right.

Hannah: You know, what's crazy is I had somebody on and this. Is what, this is the most interesting thing. I see this a lot, now I had somebody who did it today, but I see it a lot, which is people saying like, fine, if we're going to, if people are going to start hiring people without college degrees, then I need them to have at least five years experience before they start.

And I'm like, that's interesting because you don't require that of entry level college graduates when they first get into a job, and they are basically starting from the same exact level of knowledge. Almost exactly. I was like, they don't know anything about the job when they get to the job, they never had a job.

They were in college. You know, this is the first time they've ever had an entry level, whatever job, insert whatever field job, and the difference really between somebody without a degree and somebody with one who starting from that same position. Basically nothing. It's negligible. I would say. Then you might have a few outliers who like really studying and like really driven and self-taught and stuff like that.

But the thing about those people is that they would be like that regardless. They didn't learn it because of college. They learned it rather in spite of college, I would argue. That's very opinion heavy, but that's just my, that's just my viewpoint.

Ryan: Yeah. And so just to finish up that story and to answer your question, how long does it take to become that proficient in Excel is I can get you at that proficient at Excel in 10 minutes.

Hannah: Oh.

Ryan: I mean, to be more proficient than these, than these entry-level engineers.

Hannah: Right.

Ryan: Right. So to the point of which you're doing rudimentary functions I mean, we can do that in a day, maybe. There's a couple of things that you have to understand first, but I mean, as long as we have a goal that we're working towards right? Now, I think that's a problem with general learning. And I've dealt with this myself is whenever I've tried to learn something to just to learn it, I've almost never learned it. I've never, I've never succeeded, right? That's what we talk about with work, right? We've talked about at the very beginning of this, of all of this and is what's the most important thing about work is like the why, right? Like why are you going to work every day? And I think that that needs to be abundantly clear to everybody.

Right? I mean, you're going to work for money. All right. Well, what does money mean to you? Right? What's the story you tell yourself about money. Well, why is that important? So I can feed my kids. So I can set my kids, so I can send my kids to college. We hear that all the time. You know what I mean?

Okay. So that I can go on a vacation once a year, you know, and anyway, anyway,

Hannah: So that I can go out with my family for dinner a lot.

Ryan: So I can shop at whole foods and then I don't have to look at the, at how much things cost. Right? Like that's why I work. Right, I think that that is the number one thing that people need to do before they, even—every morning, they need to understand why they work.

So I think learning is exactly the same way. Okay. A good example is when I first started to build websites I was first trying to learn HTML and CSS. I was just trying to make a site like, I'm just trying to learn it. I was following like this Mozilla, Firefox, whatever, and then I follow up a couple of other like tutorials and stuff and it just wasn't clicking.

It didn't make sense to me. I was like, I did it perfectly and I made it how the thing wanted me to make it. But there was no purpose behind doing it, so I'd forgot it all. Right, but then we started, then we started our first business, right? And our first business was a dropshipping site. Okay. Now I had, and how I had a reason to learn it.

I didn't know how to build a website before that. You know what I mean? I didn't know. I mean, I had an entry level, I knew how to spell HTML and I know how to spell CSS. That's it.

Hannah: Great start.

Ryan: Great start. That's all. And that's all I knew, but then I had the "Why?" And you saw me. I spent. You know, I was working at the time. I was in a I was an accountant during the day. I was a bartender at night and then all my nights off from that, I spent hours. Hours, hours, hours at the computer.

Hannah: You're trying to fix the buttons. Try to make, oh, I want this button to be raised.

Ryan: Right, and learning how to learning, how to learning, how to do all of that stuff.

Right. I didn't even know that there was a different, I didn't know that there was things, you know, content management systems. I didn't know what that was. What is, what is WordPress and Drupal and Joomla? What is Shopify, what is BigCommerce, right? What is WooCommerce? What are these things?

You know what I mean? I didn't know that I needed to know one of these use this thing called PHP, and one of these things use this thing called liquid, and then one of these things uses, I think it was SQL. And I mean, like, I didn't know any of that. But I never would have—I never would have learned it if I didn't have the why.

Hannah: Now that's why you need it. Cause I just realized, I always struggled with that. I think there's a lot of the reason I struggled in school with math, I was like why? And no one had ever given me a good reason. Like, you know, I know I'm obstinate and everything about math, but at the same time, like I asked, I said, what am I going to do with this?

Like, and sincerely, I was like, what am I going to do with this? And no one ever answered me. And I was sincere. I was like, what does this do? And no one ever gave me any sort of— I don't think I ever got an answer at all much less a satisfactory one.

And so I just stopped paying attention. Cause I was like, I don't think this is useful because nobody told me why it was. Even when I asked, and so I just realized that the only time that I've ever really, really pushed through that and did something that was technical or, you know, math or number heavy, it was when I got my Salesforce Admin cert, and it was because I saw it at a job application. I was like, I need to get this. I have to get this to apply for this job, for these jobs. And so that's why I got it, and I think that that is really important because that you need your why you're learning the skill too. To get you to your why you're going to work every day.

And I think that that brings us to like—kind of 0.2 ish. We kind of touched on it, but like figuring out what you don't hate. I think the key thing, the key point that I think people need to take away though. So, and I'm just going to call it a lie because it is. A lie that we're told all our whole lives if you grew up going into an American school, they tell us that—they imply and they just flat out tell us that we should love our jobs, that we should be passionate about our jobs. There is nothing wrong with being passionate about your work or job, there is nothing wrong with loving it.

The problem becomes when you sacrifice your financial security for that before you realize that's what you're doing. And I'll explain this a little bit more, but I mean, what happens is people go to college, like I'm going to go pursue my passion of teaching or whatever, and they don't look up how much money they're going to get paid and they don't look up what, what they actually are going to need to live and the way that they'd like to.

And this is true for people that go into all different forms of work, right? But if you have life goals that cost money, you are going to end up resenting this passion job, because it's going to underpay you. Take your emotional energy from you and trap you in that place. Especially, if you paid for four to six years to get a degree in it because people get very boxed in when they dig themselves in. You know, and now they have debt that they have to pay off and they have to use this degree in this way. I get that people are maybe moving on a little bit more now, but at the same time, people are still really trapping themselves into this where this like my work, like I have to love my work.

Like, no, you don't, you have to do your work. You have to get paid for your work. It really does not matter what you do. You just have to be okay with doing it. And that's good enough. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. So, being willing to do work because it needs to get done just helps. It just helps you because it opens up more options to you and you might be able to find something that pays you well enough to actually do what you want on your own time without having to substitute work as your passion.

Another problem with that is that when you believe that your work is your passion, it allows companies to low ball you. It allows them to pay you less and you will be okay with it because you feel that you have this obligation to love this, this thing, but it's just, it's a company. It's employing you and you don't have to love it to do work.

Ryan: So I think that sounds really irrelevant to what we're talking about, and it kind of is to be honest. But it's irrelevant enough and that's a secondary effect. It's irrelevant. What you're talking about is downstream from picking these employable skills, right? Like so upstream from all of that, that you're talking about is at the very impetus of this, you have to kind of be willing to learn something that you're not super thrilled about.

Just to make it, just wrap it up, how that relates to what we're talking about today.

Hannah: Yeah. I'm more saying that to the people who have that mindset and are now struggling with the financial reality of the results of it. So, if you're looking to pick employable skills, make sure you find them backwards, which means look to the companies to tell you what they're hiring, do not listen to what the college is telling you about what they're hiring. The colleges have no idea what's going on in the hiring markets because they're not the ones hiring. They're selling, and the companies are the ones hiring. So just go to the companies, look at the job descriptions, organize them on a note pad or Excel sheet and figure out what they're hiring for, and then from there, pick what skill you're going to pursue. Now, pick something that you don't absolutely positively hate. You know, you don't have to love it, but just find something you don't hate that you can learn for the least amount of money and time. So basically just trying to get the biggest bang for your buck.

So also just yeah, as quickly as possible for as little as possible, and that makes you as hireable as possible. So all three of those things, ideally.

Ryan: And you don't have to stop at one skill obviously. If there's a list of three to four skills that you've identified you, you can do all three of them.

You can do all four of them. It just, this is the order that you're going to go. This is the order that you're going to do them in. And then just because you they've identified that there are these four skills throughout all of these job applications, doesn't mean that after you've retained one of them that you can't just apply to the job.

Right. I mean it doesn't mean that you kind apply to the job without any of it. I mean, you could just, you could apply to the job.

Yeah you should.

And then apply and then they reject you or your resume doesn't get through then, okay, if the job is still up after, after you've done the first one apply again.

All right. If. After the second one, they reject you again, after you pick up the second one re apply again and just, and rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

Hannah: And, and then just iterate, just teach yourself more stuff. If that were a good example of the way this would look was like learning Excel, apply for a job that says they require a lot of Excel proficiency, they turn you down. Okay. Well, you know what else is on here? They also want that person to have a customer service experience. Oh, wait. You have customer service experience. Great. Now you have two of the requirements and then another thing you see on there is proficiency with a certain type of software.

So then go take a certification course in that software. Now you're a triple threat and apply again.

Ryan: And I think so another thing, just to kind of sum it up, what we talked about specifically about Excel, it doesn't take much to become proficient enough with it. It's really what these companies say is advanced Excel, I think it's not that advanced, you can learn it in a week.

Hannah: I think you're right.

Ryan: They're just happy to have somebody that knows that you can have more than one spreadsheet in your workbook. You know what I mean? Right.

Hannah: What? I do know that. That's all I know, but–

Ryan: And okay, not only that, the most important thing, I mean, even with work, when learning these skills, you got to remember the why, and only you can figure that out. And it's important because without the why you might not understand, you might not be motivated to learn these skills. You might just be thinking I'm just learning these skills. So then these skills is a waste of time, especially if you are doing something that you're not super thrilled about, especially if you're not doing something that is quote unquote, your passion.

If you're not doing that, then you're like, ah, why am I doing this? And you have to have a strong why to keep you going. Because learning Excel, especially if you don't know why you're learning it, I mean, especially if you don't know, like you don't have like a specific Excel problem in front of you. It's like, I have to create my own problem in order to figure this out, right. But you have to remember the why of why you're learning it and that's to get hired so that you can make money to do whatever, right? I mean, just remember that. And I think that that kind of wraps it up. I think that this was a pretty important episode.

Hannah: Yeah. I think it unexpectedly became more important than I thought it was at the beginning.

Ryan: Well, no, I think it's more, I think it was more, I think it was important from the very beginning in that this is one of the things that people come to us and say like, I don't have skills.

Hannah: Like how do I figure out what to do.

Ryan: Yeah, they don't have skills. How do I acquire skills? Like before I even acquire the skills, how do I pick which skills to acquire? Right? Usually the question is how do I learn the skills? But the question you need to answer before that is this question.

Hannah: How do you find them? How do you decide?

Ryan: Yeah.

How do I even decide where to spend my energy? And that's why this is important. Because you need to pick the skills that you're going to learn before you learn the skills that you're gonna learn.

Hannah: All right, folks, thank you so much for watching, please like, and subscribe so you don't miss anything. And as I said, if you found any of this actionable or you're wondering what to do next, we do have a guide on our site.

You can grab that and it will go through how to go about doing these things, and it will tell you how to find employable skills, how to figure out what soft skills you have, how to do a resume, how to do a cover letter, how to apply. Just really useful, really actionable stuff.

Ryan: Yeah, and once again, guys, if you guys haven't already, if you guys cared a like, and subscribe, leave a review if you can.

It really helps to get our message out there. It really helps to get our podcasts out there so that other people can see it. Yep. Until next time guys, Aloha.