By Hiran de Silva
Refers to: The WSP Annual Budgeting process transformation
When someone says they’re being hired for their Excel skills, what does that actually mean?
It sounds obvious at first—after all, people learn Excel in hopes of landing a job. But there’s a deeper question that often goes unasked: What exactly is the employer expecting from someone hired for their Excel skills?
The answer is more revealing than most realize.
You’re Being Hired to Stay in the Box
Most of the time, when someone is hired “for their Excel skills,” the expectation is not innovation. It’s compliance.
You’re expected to maintain the existing spreadsheets. Update the existing formats. Work within the familiar templates. In short—you’re being hired to stay inside the box.
This was true in the WSP annual budgeting example I often refer to. Low pay, rigid templates, siloed work. The entire job was designed around preserving the system as it was. You weren’t expected to question the system, let alone improve it. And certainly not to bring a metaphorical spray gun.
What Happens When You Do Bring the Spray Gun?
In that very same budgeting job, I showed Tom Bauer the spray gun. Not literally—but I demonstrated an enterprise-grade transformation that reimagined the process entirely.
The result?
That single action led to a contract worth £540,000.
And yet, this was not what the person who hired me had envisioned. Their goal was continuity, not disruption. So let’s be clear: You’re not hired to bring innovation. But every company contains the opportunity for it.
So the question becomes:
Will you seize that opportunity, or will you stay in the box where it’s safe, quiet, and low-paid?
The Path to Triple Your Pay
This is the core of what I teach.
- To recognize the difference between working inside the box and operating with a spray gun mindset.
- To see that even temporary or low-level Excel jobs contain hidden leverage.
- To understand that your value doesn’t lie in whether you can do a VLOOKUP faster—but in whether you can reimagine the whole process around it.
But you won’t get there through social media Excel content.
Misinformation: The Social Media Trap
The Excel ecosystem today is flooded with advice, tutorials, influencers, and so-called experts.
But what are they really teaching?
They’re reinforcing in-the-box thinking—power queries, dynamic arrays, XLOOKUPs, LAMBDA functions—all useful, but none of them designed to question the broader system. And crucially, none of them empower you to escape Excel hell, let alone lead a transformation that will make your skills indispensable to your employer.
People like Mark Proctor push the idea that spinning up databases is too difficult for “citizen developers.” They imply you need permission, training, or a data science degree.
But that’s not true.
Microsoft Access was created precisely to democratize database capabilities. It was built so that you don’t need to go through IT bottlenecks. You don’t need permission to extend Excel’s power.
You just need to know how.
Final Thought
So when you’re hired for your Excel skills, remember this:
You’re being hired to maintain the status quo.
But inside every job is the opportunity to deliver transformation.
Will you take it?
Will you bring the spray gun?
Or will you stay in the box—comfortable, replaceable, and underpaid?
The choice is yours.
But the roadmap? That’s what I’m here to teach.
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