HW Something about commas and multiple things in one field idrk (1 Viewer)

So I admittedly dont pay attention enough in class and have a HW assignment due tonight on a database which i've figured my way through up until now.

Basically my issue is I have a thing whith an area of expertise for a job/contract that has area type of expertise in it and a desc. of that area of expertise.
The problem is some jobs require more than one area of expertise and contractors have more than one area, in the excel data that I have to convert its separated by a comma, so I just entered it by hand with a comma separating the expertise code (three letter abbreviation, youll see in the attachments).

When I try to make a relationship between the two areas it obviously doesnt let me because theres a comma in there.

I entered data before creating the relationships which is probably a poor move but whatever.

Basically my question is how do I get access to read the different required expertises (separated by commas) in the same field or whatever.

Due tonight? I suspect your problem is going to take longer than that to implement.

By any chance, do you recall whether your instructor talked about normalization? Because what you have literally screams "unnormalized."

What you SHOULD have done was to break up your three-character specialty codes so that you would have a child table enumerating (listing) the codes in a record that was a child of the contract. You also a similar table as a child of the contractor record.

Then the data file you showed us lists contractors in a way that should be normalized as well. You had records listing "Contractor 1" and "Contractor 2" which should have been stored in a contractors table with an arbitrary contractor ID field (yes, which COULD have been as simple as 1 or 2...).

The amount of work to be done is beyond the typical level of support that we give around here, particularly for someone who neglected his class work. With more time, we might have guided you to a good conclusion but if this is due tonight I don't have an answer for you and have no desire to do your work for you. I won't be the one getting the grade. If someone else takes this on, good for you. But this is not something I care to attempt on short notice with too little time.