If you’ve ever opened a spreadsheet, chances are you probably didn’t find it particularly fun—or feel eager to open it again in your free time.
“When you’re rolling your finger down the resume and you see, ‘Oh my gosh, competitive Excel, What is this like? I want to talk to this kid about this,’” Insko told Fortune. “Just that alone is enough to get you in the interview room.”
Excel competitions themselves are far from ordinary. Students build complex formulas to perform everything from risk-and-return calculations for stock portfolios to mock video game avatar tracking systems. It’s high speed, high-pressure problem-solving—just with spreadsheets.
“A year ago, I had no clue what Excel esports was, and now here we were, world champions,” he told Fortune.
“The interviewer will look at their resume, and they’ll see [Excel esports], and they’ll say, what is that? Tell me about it,” Kelley said. “They get to tell a story.”
As AI makes it easier for students to polish resumes and cover letters, Kelley said having something tangible, competitive, and niche like Excel esports can make all the difference.
“What I tell my students is the world is hungry for problem solvers, and if you can demonstrate that you can solve problems, then you’re valuable to some employer,” he said.
Having an NIL sponsorship to your name can also travel well beyond campus, Adkins added.
“If you’re talking to two candidates for a job, and one of them says, I know how to use Microsoft Excel, and the other one says, I’m so good at Microsoft Excel I got a sponsorship from a large convenience store chain,” Adkins said. “I definitely think it’s an advantage.”
