Is VBA for Excel becoming a less common skill?

[jillian728]

We have many VBA for Excel projects that have been developed over the last 10 years or so. We typically have had a long term intern on staff working to create and maintain. All of these interns had VBA for Excel experience coming in and were able to hit the ground running. Our problem now is that it has become increasingly hard to find students with VBA for Excel experience.

We are considering converting our VBA for Excel macros into Alteryx. We have a license but haven't had much time to really kick the tires to see if our VBA projects could convert. Considering looking for an intern with Alteryx rather than VBA to give us another option.

Now for my questions:

1) Is VBA for Excel becoming a less common skill for college students or in general?

2) Anyone have thoughts about converting VBA projects to Alteryx? For example, do you think it would work to focus on someone with Alteryx skills and they don't necessarily need to have a handle on VBA code? Of course that will be more work for us to explain what the code is doing if they are unable to ascertain on their own.

3) Any other thoughts on this topic? Such as, if they don't have Alteryx but have another similar (?) tool, could that work?

 

[JEC]

1) VBA is not becoming a less common skill in general. However, students with proper VBA skills are pretty rare. For example you could give a shot at:

- Data scientists/analysts
- Math students
- Engineering students

The thing is, in many cases VBA is self-taught, which takes a lot of time. Especially getting to a high level. Most students do not fully focus on VBA.
For the future, VBA is not disappearing anytime soon, since Excel is world's most widely used program among companies.

 

[Joe4]

And I don't know if you would have any better luck finding people with experience with Alteryx.
Quite frankly, I have never heard of it before now, so I am not sure how common it would be to find students with knoweldge in it (unless it is something that is used at colleges and universities).