Developing Administrative Skills (Part 1 of 2)

Developing Administrative Skills (Part 1 of 2)

Today’s blog is one in a series on education, best practices and industry hot topics related to careers in Administration, including but not limited to those working as Executive Assistants, Admin Assistants and Office Managers.  Today’s Admins handle duties that have no limits in scope and as the greater Philadelphia’s most trusted Corporate Transportation partner, Kevin Smith Transportation Group is invested in supporting those who work to make sure their companies run smoothly every day. 

If you’re applying for administrative assistant jobs, you’ve got a fair bit of competition. According to inc.com, every corporate job opening attracts 250 resumes. Out of those 250, only four or five are called to an interview.

When you’re competing with hundreds of people for a job opening, it makes sense to be the best candidate possible. By adding the skills hiring managers look for to your resume, you should stand out as a highly qualified candidate for administrative assistant positions.

We haven’t just given a generic description of these skills, though. In order to get you maximum results, we’ve spoken to leading HR Directors in the area and asked them to list each skill with why it matters, how you can develop it with specific actions and links to helpful sites. As a bonus, they also included how to copy and paste keywords to describe those skills on your resume.

So let’s begin.

Organizational Skills

Why it matters.  Strong organizational skills make for an indispensable administrative assistant. Bosses depend on their assistants to keep their offices running smoothly and a well-organized assistant will likely become irreplaceable.

As an administrative assistant, you will need to keep your supervisor’s hectic life in working order, remembering things like where airline tickets are and when critical deadlines are approaching.

How to develop it.  Start by becoming an organized person in your day to day life. Go through your car, your home, and your work space, creating systems for how to keep things on track. Get comfortable with various note taking, calendaring, and task management systems you can use to organize your schedule.

If you become an organized person by habit in your everyday life, it should make you an organized person at the office.

How to describe it on your resume.  Use the following terms like Office management, record keeping, filing, documentation, project management, problem solving, strategic thinking, managing schedules, managing appointments, schedule creation and tracking.

If you want to hire your own Personal Assistant to book ground transportation, call 610-222-6225 and speak to one of Kevin Smith Transportation Group’s Corporate Concierges who can assist you with everything from Airport Transportation, Executive Black Car Service and Employee Shuttle Services.

Multitasking

Why it matters.  Administrative assistants often find themselves working on multiple projects at once. An administrative assistant might have to stop in the middle of reorganizing the file room to work on a research project for their boss, and then field several phone calls before returning to the file room project. Being able to clearly focus on several things at once makes for a very valuable employee.

How to develop it.  Whenever you have to stop in the middle of a task, write a note of where you are and what you’ll be doing next. This way, when you come back to your abandoned task, you’ll have a clear reminder of what you had accomplished and what was left to do.

Try and group related tasks together by task batching, so type up a few memos at the same time or return a few phone calls at the same time. It’s much easier to work on several similar types of projects at once than it is to try and focus on completely different things simultaneously.

A great way to get better at multitasking is to practice doing things like having a conversation and writing down something unrelated to the conversation. The more experience your brain has keeping multiple things running at once, the better you’ll be under stress.

Finally, one of the most important multitasking tips is to familiarize yourself with your boss’s priorities. If you know what projects your boss would prefer getting done first, you can appropriately figure out which things need to be juggled and which can wait an hour or two.

How to describe it on your Resume.  Keywords to use include balancing multiple responsibilities simultaneously, multitasking, setting project priorities, critical thinking.

If you want to hire your own Personal Assistant to book ground transportation, call 610-222-6225 and speak to one of Kevin Smith Transportation Group’s Corporate Concierges who can assist you with everything from Airport Transportation, Executive Black Car Service and Employee Shuttle Services.

Thank you for reading part 1 of today’s blog on the Administrative Professional industry.  Please visit us every week as we continue to publish tips, industry news and strategies that directly impact every Administrative Professional.  Next week we will publish part 2 of today’s blog on Developing Administrative Skills.