In this episode, Dave sits down with Best-selling author, entrepreneur, coach, and engaging geek Jennifer Buchholz. Jennifer has worked in higher education, training, and development for over 20-years and when she realized that traditional methods weren’t helping her students thrive—she founded Excel & Flourish. Excel & Flourish helps organizations and teams improve productivity and reduce frustration with Microsoft products through fun technical skills training. In this episode, Jennifer shares practical strategies and tools that will help you and your team improve productivity and reduce frustration.
Bio:
I grew up surrounded by computers and computer programs. My mom was an executive assistant. It seemed like everything in our house was part of a spreadsheet, a database, or a Word document. My grandfather built computers, so I had a computer at college in 1992. For me, working with computers came like breathing. But I knew that wasn’t the case for everyone.
When I started my company, Flourish, back in 2012, my intention was to do trainings in things like conflict resolution. But I soon found that people were responding more to the little note on the back of my card: “I also do MS training.”
I saw how people lost confidence when they had access to all kinds of technology but didn’t know how to use it. They felt limited. They “didn’t know what they didn’t know.”
As a Microsoft Office trainer and specialist, my greatest joy is watching an employee stop feeling intimidated and overwhelmed by the programming that’s supposed to be serving them.
My motto is: “Transformational technical training takes translation.”
When you set people loose on Google or YouTube to find the answers, they quickly get lost, and begin to feel limited, and less than competent, when all they really need is someone to show them three things:
• What do they need to know to use the technology and accomplish the task at hand?
• Where do they find this information?
• How do they apply it?
That’s where I come in.
Instead of putting your people through hours of exhausting training that’s impossible to absorb because it doesn’t relate to their needs, I’m the “engaging geek” who makes the learning fun and relevant to their job.
By engaging your people in hour-long training groups, followed by study halls and practice sessions, I show them how to apply the technology to the specific issues they are having on the job, rather than to some abstract set of problems.
I see people leave my training sessions having gained three things:
• Increased confidence in using the technology they’ve been given
• More curiosity and excitement about what’s possible
• Greater creativity – how they can use programs independently and to their advantage, for example, by adding their own automations
I work with large corporations, small to midsize businesses, and non-profits. The people who typically reach out to me for help are human resource managers, learning and development managers, and people in charge of sales, finance, IT and marketing departments.
You’ve got the technology. I’ve got the experience. Together, we can beat overwhelm.
Get In Touch:
Jennifer Buchholz’s LinkedIn Profile
