Attire can vary in administrative positions but expect that you need to dress professionally. Only if you are working from home or in a particularly industrial or entertainment industry atmosphere might you dress some other way. If you are serving politicians or the top of a large corporation then dress more formally rather than less so. When you work face to face with blue collar people such as warehouse personnel then, if and only if the boss specifically tells you it is okay would you ever wear anything less formal than professional attire. During the past couple of decades in North America there has been a ‘dressing down’ trend sparked mainly by two factors: people are attached to comfort. Most professional attire is comfortable if you spend enough time wearing it to get used to it.
Write ups: Most administrative positions involve writing and typing or word processing or all three. What you write depends partly upon how distinctive the administrative post is from a secretary or receptionist position. In some companies, one person handles all three of these types of work. There you are in the front of the office. Walk ins come in through the front door. Customers call on the telephone and a boss comes out from behind you. All of these people need you to do things for them. In the old days most of the people in the ‘back office’ were not typists. So, he or she would bring you either a handwritten letter or notes from which you come up with a letter on company letterhead. If there is a tremendous amount of typing or word processing involved then this is more of a secretarial type of position. How much of this kind of thing there is matters a lot with respect to whether or not you are good at it. Personally, I am not a good typist and I am much faster when I am actually writing something myself such as this article. This fact made me totally unfit for many administrative positions but barely created any difficulty in others. Forty words per minute is okay for a job where typing is a minor part of the job: transcribing at ninety words per minute is absolutely required for many other ones. Writing up can be anything from filling in reports in a probation office, to writing the occasional brief letter to a client or it can be writing letters and reports daily for your boss.
In conclusion, there are various other tasks that normally go along with being an administrative assistant but they are not universal to every case of this type of job. Just keep your eyes open and be prepared for some little tasks that seem very ‘miscellaneous’ whether it is controlling the keys to the restrooms or for other employees or if it is changing the water cooler water or making the boss coffee and taking letters to the postage machine. Now that you have had all of these lessons you know a great deal more about what to expect within the world of administrative assistants.
