Article written by: Keith Walker | Administration Assistant | MD Accountants & Auditors Inc.
Fifteen years ago I never thought that my job title would be Administration Assistant. I thought that I would be working somewhere that was outside the office environment
At first, if someone asked me what I did for a living I would tell them that I was an Administration Assistant, but now I tell people that I am an assistant. I tell them this because over the years I have helped out in every department in some way or another.
If I look back at my time as an Administration Assistant, I realise that I play a major role in the company. I help to coordinate, schedule, compile, file, generate information, make sure that phone calls and faxes get to where they need to be, control access to the building, guide visitors and make sure that uninvited guests (spiders, lizards, bees and wasps) stay out. And on regular occasions, I become the office handy man. These being some of the many things I do.
As an Administration Assistant, you try to focus on doing things right the first time. Yes, you can get them wrong but you want to learn from these errors so that you don’t do them again. So you try to understand things that are asked of you before you go away to plan things out.
Most times, your plan for the day doesn’t work. An Administration Assistants job is complementary to other office roles and sometimes other jobs have to take precedence. But give us a bit of time and we will get the job done.
We learn many new skills in order to get the job done. But as you go through your day of getting your work done, you develop skills that you never knew you had before and you don’t realise that it is happening. You start to learn how to use shortcuts in Excel, talk on the phone and work at the same time, become an excellent barista, we know how to come up with a quick plan of action, regardless of the situation. These are some of the many skills that I learned.
Perhaps two of the most important skills that all Admin staff develop are the following:
- We know what has happened before it will happen again and this is something that is applied to people as well as processes. Administration Assistants re-use this knowledge over and over and over again.
- We tend to see everything that can go either right or wrong, no matter what the situation.
These are just two on the many skills that we use not only at the office, but also in our personal lives. I enjoy being an Administration Assistant. I enjoy the fact that no two days are the same. This is a job for someone who enjoys variety in their work, someone who doesn’t want to be bored at their desk but wants to be a major part of the network that is the company.