Administrative professional career path

- So where do you begin? You may wonder what the true career path looks like for an administrative professional. Well you may start out as a receptionist and move yourself up into an administrative professional role. Most entry level type administrative professionals start out assisting lower level managers and sometimes sales managers. At any level, you can progress into becoming an actual executive assistant who usually reports directly to a director or even to a vice president of a company. So there are always opportunities for advancement. In order to progress as an administrative professional, it's a matter of making sure that you stay up to date on technology and that you truly excel at your job. You also need to start working with other executive assistants to see what they do and how they handle their jobs. How are they able to multitask? How do they manage more than one person? How do manage multiple calendars? It's very important for you to take a step further and shadow one of those executive assistants if that's what you are aspiring to become. It's up to you to decide if you want to move up to the level of a senior executive assistant. Most of these roles report directly to a very high level executive in the company such as presidents, owners, or CEOs of companies. When you get to that level, you're actually more of an on-call assistant. In effect, a side extension of your executive even more so than in your past roles. You are their link with the external world. You are the gatekeeper. They are very busy and this implies that you have to be more involved in maintaining their schedule, travel, etc. The position is simply on a different level. The great thing is you can learn on the job through observation. You have to be willing to put in the work, be willing to go out to find training courses, and be willing to ask somebody for help. You will have to know how to find the answers you need, but don't be too intimidated. You can do it. There are all kinds of forms and teaching tools to help you and there are other administrative assistants out there that are in all kinds of roles just like you are. And they can guide you to the right tools and give you the right information. It's up to you though to decide on your career path. You have to make that decision to go from an administrative professional to an executive assistant to a senior level executive assistant. If you aspire to do that, know that each role will be different and that each role will be extremely demanding the higher you go. However, it's also a role where you really can learn and benefit for the future, especially if you want to progress in your career. As an administrative professional, you have successfully acquired knowledge on everything about the company because you touch every aspect of the business. There are a lot of opportunities for different career paths, but they all start with you. If you aspire to become a senior level executive assistant, then start working on that today. It will take time to achieve because there is an extremely high degree of confidentiality and professionalism required. And while you won't become a senior level executive assistant over night, the time and effort will be well worth it.