How Jennifer Buchholz Excelled and Flourished with Microsoft Training

I'm often asked,” How did you even get started doing Microsoft training?” To put it simply, I grew up (or, Excelled and Flourished) with it! My mom was an executive assistant in a county organization, and they were very much used to the Lotus, Lotus one, two, three, word Perfect programs, so she was an expert at that. I actually remember them converting to Microsoft because she would come home and just complain all the time. But my mom was really good at her work so in order for her to excel and flourish her expertise on Microsoft products, everything in our household became organized in a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or an Access database. 

Which in turn, meant that my sister and I would need to understand how to use the same products and programs as well. So, I just always saw stuff organized that way- it was what I knew growing up! Not only was my mom using it all the time, but my grandpa actually built computers too. 

When I hit my corporate career right out of college, they were asking me (as a Project Manager) to put together a budget projection for the upcoming year. So what did I do? Naturally, I put the budget projection in Excel. But this was for my boss, so I utilized some good formulas, added some easy-to-read charts and was really excited to turn it in to my boss. 

And they were blown away.

Keep in mind, this was the mid-nineties. Even though I made sure it was presentable enough for my boss to be pleased, I was surprised because Excel had been around a while. To me, it wasn’t anything new. They had just never used it in that particular application. 

The next thing I knew, they had asked me to train our whole department of Project Managers on how to do the budget projection spreadsheets as I had originally presented. Then they started using my products to do it, so I trained them how to do it, and now I became a subject matter expert at a very young age while in a massive global organization on the Microsoft suite.  I became that person people could go to for a question instead of asking the boss, which is one of the benefits of small group training.

So I feel like this talent of mine was a calling that should be shared with others, who could then be able to apply what they learned to make their life easier and less time-consuming. I have always just figured out how to take a business problem and use these tools to solve it, and I feel like that's what I still do today.

I love Microsoft programs, teaching people how it can make an impact in their job, and I love being able to save business owners money with every keystroke. Connect with me today so we can properly assess your team, get everybody on the same page, and on track towards your goals.