Although Google is trying to catch up with their Workspace apps (formerly known as G Suite), Microsoft is still leading the market with their Office — a selection of office tools necessary for any modern business.
And while Word or PowerPoint are pretty straightforward and happily used by most employees, Excel is often dreaded. The tool is surely the most complex of all and can deliver amazing results to both newcomers and professional data scientists — if one only takes the time to learn it.
Excel offers a lot of ways to automate both basic and more complex calculations and using these features is the key to making office work more efficient. But the power and potential of Excel don’t end with the built-in features. There is a way to take Microsoft’s tool to another level and do tasks that would normally take hours to accomplish in a matter of seconds.
How to achieve this? Hire VBA developers.
How can VBA developers power up your business?
VBA stands for Visual Basic for Applications — a special implementation of Visual Basic tailored to be used with Microsoft Office applications, primarily Excel. The key to understanding the power of VBA is automation. The language allows developers to delivered tailored solutions automating routine tasks done with tools like Excel.
For example, imagine a situation where you have to deliver a monthly report on the results of one of your enterprise’s divisions. Even if you have everything you need stored securely in databases, it would take time to manually acquire, format, and calculate all this. With VBA, such operation could be completed within seconds — a professional VBA programmer can build an automated solution that will generate a report on a monthly basis. Your job will be only to analyze it. No more tedious manual copy-pasting and formatting anymore!
And while VBA is considered primarily as an Excel language, it can also improve the efficiency of your work with other tools, such as:
- Other Microsoft Office apps
- AutoCAD
- ArcGIS
- CorelDraw
- LibreOffice
- Reflection
- SolidWorks
- WordPerfect
- UNICOM System Architect
- ...and more.
If you are using any of the above tools and feel that your work could use some automation — it might be the right time to hire VBA developers.
The must-have hard skills for VBA developers
The first step in the hiring process should be assessing your candidate’s technical skills. Without the right set of these, there is simply no way your VBA developers will deliver the results you want in a timely manner.
The most important technical skills for VBA developers are:
- Expert understanding of VBA
VBA isn’t particularly loved by developers — in fact, it’s the most dreaded language, according to the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. It takes plenty of self-discipline and focus to learn the language and excel in it. Make sure to hire VBA developers with at least a few years of experience in the language — they already experienced all types of ups and downs with the technology and know exactly how to deliver the solutions your business needs to succeed.
- Experience with Microsoft Access
One of the lesser-known elements of the Microsoft Office software collection. Access is a database tool often used when working with Excel and VBA.
- Expert knowledge of Excel
To grasp the full potential of Excel with VBA, one needs to first understand the tool itself. Your VBA developer should be a true expert in Excel, with the knowledge of all the most complex formulas and operations in the vanilla version of the tool. Only by knowing these, they can later expand the functionality of Excel to the level you need.
- Experience with other tools and platforms
Of course, you might also want to hire VBA developers to handle automation for tools other than Excel. In such a case, you should make sure to choose the candidates that have already experienced working with the tool you are using. For example, if your goal is to automate AutoCAD operations, you’ll benefit more from an AutoCAD expert proficient with VBA rather than an Excel expert.
Leveraging the potential of soft skills
Your Excel automation project won’t go anywhere if your VBA developer doesn’t have all the necessary hard skills — but you should also pay attention to the soft skills. These can highly impact your whole team and how well the automation solutions are tailored to the needs of your employees.
To make sure you get the results you need in a truly efficient manner, hire VBA developers with the following set of soft skills:
- Approachability
To always take into consideration the needs of other people in the company when developing new VBA solutions.
- Attention to detail
To deliver solutions that are truly reliable — you don’t want to end up with reports that present incorrect data!
- Expert time management
To easily switch between different tasks and find time for both planning and development.
Finding VBA developers who truly fit your business
You shouldn’t, however, assess your candidates purely on their hard and soft skills. There is one more layer to consider — how well these candidates actually fit your company.
We recommend looking especially closely at the following two areas of company fit:
- Industry fit
Even the use of such a popular tool as Excel differs between the industries. Businesses need different data analyzed, from different sources, and using different calculations. To make sure your operations are improved fast and exactly as you want, hire VBA developers with previous experience in your industry. They will have the knowledge needed to deliver solutions tailored to your needs and be aware of the obstacles waiting for businesses like yours.
- Company culture fit
Just as soft skills, this layer of company fit can impact not only your new hire but actually everyone working closely with them. The closer the match between the VBA developer and the rest of your team, the more the results will be tailored to your employees’ unique needs.
How to make sure that your new VBA developers will fit well with the culture present at your office? First, consider the values that drive your business, such as the style of management and hierarchy at the company or the focus on diversity. Then, hire VBA developers who also consider these values important.
When to hire remote VBA developers?
Before you decide to hire VBA developers, you should first consider whether you can find true specialists in the technology in your local area. VBA is used only by approximately 6.2% of professional developers, which means there might be issues with finding such experts in some regions.
This is where remote work options come in. There is a number of advantages coming with choosing the remote approach, including:
- Easier access to top talents from across the world — you don’t have to stick to mediocre devs and instead hire VBA developers who are truly the best of the best.
- Smoother 24/7 support for your VBA-powered operations — hire VBA developers living in a few different timezones and guarantee instant help for all your employees.
- More chances to optimize your spendings — the global average salary of VBA developers is approximately $51k, while the U.S. average is nearly twice as high ($97k).
Where to find experienced remote VBA developers? We recommend looking into the Central Eastern European market. Local developers there are not only considered one of the best in the world but their salary requirements are also lower due to lower costs of living in CEE countries.
Hire VBA developers and other IT experts fast
VBA developers can significantly speed up your company’s workflow and make everyone’s daily schedule more flexible. However, they are rarely responsible for the company’s main digital product itself, rather for improving the overall operations process.
Thankfully, Ideamotive’s network of talents includes IT professionals of all specialties. When you want to hire VBA developers, web developers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, IT project managers, or creative designers, we can help you find the right people fast.
Just get in touch with us and we’ll get you connected to a tailored selection of specialists, based on your company’s profile and any unique requirements you might have.
