Administrative jobs are dynamic by nature, requiring you to adapt to whatever tasks arise on a daily basis and come up with creative solutions to operational hiccups. While fundamental administrative skills never lose their value, you may hinder your professional development if you don’t seize opportunities to keep developing your talents. Regardless of your current role, think like a leader to make yourself indispensable to colleagues at every step of your career.
Whether you're in a management or an assistant role, administrative jobs are about studying the mechanics of a business and its employees to find areas where you can improve efficiency. You have to know the temperaments of everyone around you and understand how to prioritize communications to avoid disrupting the workflow. Just like the business, your career needs ongoing maintenance to ensure that you are always performing at your highest proficiency. Use that same attention to detail to evaluate yourself, and to think about instances when you could have made a process run more smoothly.
Joan Burge, author and expert administrative trainer, advises professionals to achieve success through talent optimization. Treat your career as a lifelong work of art that always has room for improvement. Ask yourself if you are completely engaged at work and whether you embrace challenges or adopt a pessimistic attitude when faced with tasks you don’t enjoy. Think about how often you take the initiative to complete professional advancement courses or sign up for free seminars and training offered at work.
Neglecting your professional development can lead to a stagnant career. You are also responsible for making sure bosses don’t pigeonhole you in dead-end administrative jobs simply because they enjoy the convenience of relying on you. Don’t expect bosses to automatically offer you more responsibility, since they don’t know the extent of your talents until you demonstrate them.
Showcase your skills and leadership qualities by volunteering to help when a colleague is struggling with an unexpected problem that you believe you can solve. Helping a co-worker fix a problem wins you an ally who can vouch for your abilities when you are ready to pursue a higher administrative job. You also gain valuable insight and firsthand experience in other aspects of the company’s workflow, making you more equipped to transition to administrative jobs in different departments or industries.
Don’t view yourself as an inferior whose job is to take orders, especially when you have specialty experience that can benefit your colleagues. Manage up by paying attention to tasks that cause your boss’s productivity level to drop, and look for ways to stay on track. If your boss struggles with writing and feels overwhelmed by the influx of morning emails, offer to take over that task and put your own communication skills to work. Managing up also means knowing how and when to gracefully present a better idea when your boss is headed for disaster.
Administrative jobs evolve with the company's needs, so you should strive for continuous professional growth. Keep expanding your role to increase your value to the company, and pursue responsibilities that relate to the positions you want.
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