Examples of Skills

Jean's original training was in bookkeeping with one of her first jobs being as a bookkeeper for the Province of BC. Most recently, she tracked grant funds for professors in the Faculty of Human and Social Development (HSD). Her duties at HSD's Research Support Centre included tracking grant funds and accounts, approving grant expense claims and research assistant timesheets, processing research scholarships, ensuring availability of funding, and moving funds when required. A single grant could range from $5,000 to $1,000,000.

Other jobs also included financial record keeping. One early job was recording payments for the District of Vanderhoof and making sure the accounts balanced. 

When Jean left that job and moved east, she kept track of membership, certification, workshop registration and payments for HRANB (at that time the HR Association of New Brunswick). Membership rose from 100 members to over 600 during the time Jean was responsible for membership care.

She's won awards in public speaking, is a published author, has been interviewed by CBC Radio, taken courses in online marketing and communications, and led workshops on creating corporate presentations. You could say that Jean enjoys communicating well.

The public speaking awards are for motivational speaking, speaking off the cuff, and evaluating speeches. Her publications include articles on adult education, human resources, and innovation. She also wrote copy for approximately 100 websites. One client once phoned her asking, "Did you write the copy for this website?" And upon being told yes the client replied, "I thought so. With all the other websites I got bored reading them. But with this one, I kept wanting to read more."  One of Jean's articles is below.

In addition, for many years Jean provided business presentation skills training to MBA students at the University of New Brunswick. She also developed and presented training to organizations including the Federal Ministry of Transportation, the NB Government, Irving, and the University of New Brunswick.

Check out the examples below.

When Jean started working at UVic's HSDR department, the training manual only had a few pages and almost all of the information was out of date. Jean created a new job manual with step by step directions and images so that anyone could do her job at UVic. Jean also created coordinated templates for creating on-brand professional social media and presentation documents (see below).

Two very large blank monitors were the first thing guests to Ocean Networks (UVic) noticed. Because the marketing department didn't have time to create content, Jean volunteered to create an attractive and educational slideshow. The marketing manager was pleased with the results and the template. Jean also worked with updating lease permissions to allow for better catering for visitors and conference attendees. She also improved electronic records.

The Toastmasters District 45 conference registration system was a manual mess. Jean and her son created an online form connecting to a database that was used for over a decade by conference attendees and registration chairs.