I wrote previously on a related note.
I'd suggest you learn how to do index + match and learn shortcuts so you can do almost anything day-to-day in Excel with just your keyboard. If you have a slow day, put the mouse to the side and start hitting alt, then the key shortcuts for whatever you need. That's how you get fast.
Once you can do that stuff, you can start looking at VBA to speed up repetitive stuff, do scenario analysis en masse, etc...
The days of being able to make 6 figures as just an Excel monkey (without kill yourself hours in investment banking) are long in the past. It's commoditized. You can get a couple of one-off macros written by online freelancers for $XX.
Data sets are a magnitude bigger these days, and Excel can't handle hardcore modeling...it really is not a good tool for more than 10,000 data points, especially if lots of formulas are involved. That being said, there's still a lot you can do with it if you're doing day-to-day stuff.
I'll also echo what others said - you need to understand what the numbers mean and why they matter, and more importantly, explain them. With being a tech whiz comes the risk of being pigeonholed.
Your real career progression is 1) learn it in and out as a differentiator, 2) use those skills to get noticed and then promoted, 3) get fresh out-of-school monkeys to whom you'll throw the work 4) read the analysis that's given to you (and know when it's way off) 5) make money with it.
See my other post here, a selection is below.
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Statistics and t-tests? Excel.
Pivot tables to break down and analyze complex data sets? Excel.
Scenario and sensitivity analysis? Excel.
Solver for best-fit formula? Excel.
Trace formulas through your entire model to understand assumptions? Excel.
Charts and graphs? Excel.
Automation of repetitive tasks you perform with your data? Excel (VBA).
What you can't do well in Excel is one-to-many lookups (example, types of plane tickets - economy, business, first class) and BIG data sets (it starts having issues over 100k rows). For that - look at MS Access and SQL. That gets you up to 3 million rows or so, and you can link it to an Excel pivot table for others to use.