Proficiency in Microsoft Office and PowerPoint are top in-demand job skills according to research

Michael Cottuli

It can be a tough job market – that much isn’t a surprise to anybody. In order to give some tips to people who are still out there looking for jobs (and to indulge in the joy of collecting data, of course) the IDC has gone about collecting some figures that tell us the top 10 skills for occupations available in the United States. It may or may not come as a surprise to some that one of these top skills is proficiency in Microsoft Office programs.

IDC_TopSkills
Top skills

Proficiency with everyone’s favorite suite of productivity tools are right up there with problem-solving, detail orientation, creativity, and integrity – fairly general personality traits that you would imagine might place much higher on the list than the ability to handle a fairly user-friendly set of programs. The only thing that stands out from the crowd of skills is “oral and written communication skills,” which seems to make sense given our hyper-social world. Hopefully, employers will continue to prioritize Microsoft Office as a hiring point – it’ll certainly make job hunting easier for us!