Those who can't get stuck with work experience. How hard is it to teach someone to use spreadsheets? Of course, I wouldn’t know, I’m entirely self-taught.
OK, so I do have a copy of Excel for Dummies by Greg Harvey PhD that was in the desk drawer when I first arrived at Blaminio, and it has come in useful now and again – especially that summer when one of the feet came off my desk during the big cash flow crisis.
Of course the real question is why you’d want to teach some ungrateful youth how to use a spreadsheet in the first place. Whatever happened to the school of hard knocks?
Anyway, having scraped through my accountancy exams by dint of a shortfall in the institute’s subs, I’d vowed never to enter a classroom again – and certainly not to be on the other side of the desk. But FD had other ideas.
It seems Blaminio has been getting negative press for not being high up enough in some newspaper’s “CSR ranking”.
Our director of PR knee-jerked the chairman into a rather panicked response: a public commitment “that we would fulfil our corporate social responsibility obligations by extending every area of the business to work placement students”.
Of course I wasn’t watching the press conference. I was watching our share price going up a notch after a favourable City comment about lean purchasing and aggressive outsourcing practices.
CSR? Pah! Would “reaching out” to a bunch of hoodies boost my option scheme payout?
But in fulfilment of our spinmeister’s desperate commitment, a few local schools eagerly snapped up the chance to get their “prize pupils” off their hands for a week: a bunch of them landed at head office and a number found their way to the finance department.
FD suddenly decided he needed to pay a visit to some reference sites for candidate software on various projects that he’d been “putting off for months”. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was referencing next door’s Xbox 360.
So as the HR director tottered in with these bewildered kids and started allocating them to staff on a random basis, I was first in the firing line.
My ASBO-in-waiting was called Clare. Our trip to the vending machine pretty much exhausted my reference points for today’s kids – soft drinks, fast food, “banging tracks” and, er, alcopops.
Then inspiration struck. All teenagers are short of money. One question about her finances and there was a ten-minute diatribe about how unfair her parents were. I smelled a real education opportunity.
I suggested the way to increase her allocation of resources (pocket money) was to put forward a realistic budget based on actual expenditure for the past few months.
OK, so it never works for the IT department; but then she wasn’t going to be asking for squillions to spend on router-me-web-wotsits. I explained I could do the template, but it would be a more productive experience if she “owned” the spreadsheet and looked to me only for specialist input.
After being shown to the slightly dodgy PC in the corner – Pentium II, at least most of the web would be inaccessible – and told she could put her files in the FD’s “work in progress” folder – where no-one would ever see it – off she beavered.
After a couple of false starts – activities across the top and the cost up the side, a schoolgirl error… oh – the final version had separate tabs for expenses such as mobile phones, entertainment, shopping, lunch, presents and shoes.
Clare had even produced some sophisticated analysis projecting expenditure forward on weekly and monthly average bases to inform her parents how hard up she was and would be for the foreseeable future. I even started teaching her some of my favourite keyboard shortcuts.
With a bit of tweaking, her spreadsheet might make a useful template for expense claims and cost allocations forms – which has been on my to-do list for some time. Hell, I’ve always said marketing needs something simple enough for a kid to use.
Sadly, Clare hasn’t been in touch with news on whether the spreadsheet resulted in more pocket money. But I wish she would.
With that kind of instinctive flair for spreadsheet manipulation, I’m wondering whether she might want to boost her income with a little subcontracted asset management and cost analysis work, enabling yours truly to have a bash on that Xbox 360.