Top 10 Skills Of An Administrative Assistant For Your Business
Top 10 skills every administrative assistant should have whether you have hired staff or partnering with a third party admin service provider.
Top 10 skills every administrative assistant should have whether you have hired staff or partnering with a third party admin service provider.
As gatekeepers to the executive office, administrative assistants are important members of any business team. They connect departments and people and help keep companies profitable. Administrative assistants can be both internal and external, but regardless a valuable resource to any business partner. Some of these resources they provide include many skills and abilities that make them an invaluable tool to business partners looking for a way to streamline or uphold a positive climb in financial growth.
The following are a few critical administrative assistant skills you should be looking for when hiring someone to provide business administration services. This in no way covers all their abilities, and many are quite capable of multi-tasking and handling many things at once as is required of them by many business partners that hire them.
When an administrative assistant is hired, everyone is always counting on them to have a solution for everything or a tool for every need. The best administrative assistants stay ahead of the tasks asked of them by keeping a documented database or Excel file of useful tools and go-to resources they will need to organize and keep things running efficiently.
Business partners are always on the lookout for an administrative assistant who can find ways to save money and help the business become more efficient. Administrative assistants are on the front lines every day overseeing operations, selecting vendors and negotiating contracts. This places them in the perfect position to look for opportunities to cut business expenses. Proposing cost-cutting solutions to those within the business is a good way to make an administrative assistant indispensable to the business partner.
An administrative assistant interacts with all sorts of people day to day, and manners are vital to keeping a polite etiquette and proper respect between the business and its customers. Whether dealing internally or externally, an open communicative and friendly person who is both well spoken and polite can be a reflection on the type of services a business is trying to provide as well as the standard of pride in which they hold their quality of care. Not only should the product itself be one hundred percent, but its delivery in both handling and the people a business communicates with as well, should be treated with equal respect and quality of purpose and care.
Profiting from this is the basic understanding that it is through the customer that a business partner manages to maintain the business at all. Vital are the working relationships, and often undervalued by the little missteps of a bad hire who cannot remain polite to a frustrated client.
This skill is also known as the ability to work autonomously. An administrative assistant should be able to process information, follow instructions and complete tasks with little to no supervision. Administrative assistants may be the only team member in a business who supports a workplace, so being independent helps them to perform tasks correctly with little assistance.
As an administrative assistant, being organized goes a long way to helping a business partner with time management. However, as an administrative assistant, they are not just managing their time, they are also managing a business partner’s time as well. On the bright side, making sure a business partner’s operation runs smoothly usually goes hand in hand with an administrative assistant’s stress levels dropping and their productivity levels rising.
Knowing how to use Microsoft Word, Outlook and Excel is a requirement for any administrative assistant’s toolkit. The knowledge of how to successfully complete virtual meetings, organize newsletters and create PowerPoint presentations puts many administrative assistants above the rest. Business partners also value administrative assistants who are capable with accounting, payroll and HR applications.
An administrative assistant with a working understanding of social media is a huge benefit for a business partner as well. Small and midsize business partners sometimes need the help managing a Facebook page or social media feed and may not have the finances to hire a social media specialist for their offices. These skills can help the business build an online presence, which is essential to staying in today’s online marketing game.
The adaptability of an administrative assistant is key to their ability to handle multiple situations on the drop of a hat. Sometimes a business partner may call unexpectedly and tell them they need to do something, unrelated to their current project, and they need it now. They must then stop everything, focus on this new task, get it done, and then re-organize and complete their previous task, with no stress or struggles.
To be able to handle this sort of competitive nature on the job is required of an administrative assistant. They need to be able to adapt, flow into and out of projects, keep track of multiple tasks, and be able to keep projects headed in smooth clear finished directions.
An administrative assistant must be able to multitask, keep everything organized, and find anything a business partner needs at a moment’s notice. They cannot do any of this without first-class organization skills. In addition, being organized will keep an administrative assistant’s work on track so that they are never behind schedule.
An administrative professional will already know that they will need to be able to adapt. In business, things can change at a rapid pace and they need to be able to handle it quickly to get the job done and assist business teammates. To do this, administrative assistants need to be resourceful in getting their tasks done through multi-tasking and creative thinking skills.
This is especially important when a business partner is unavailable during a crisis. As an administrative assistant, they need to be resourceful in exploring other avenues to reach a solution.
An administrative assistant will write many documents, from e-mails to company-wide memos, and they will need to communicate clearly and decisively. In addition, an administrative assistant will speak with many people daily, so make sure that their conversational skills are on par and their phone etiquette is excellent.
An administrative assistant provides a great many talents and skills to a potential business partner, most of which are designed to streamline the business process and help increase profit while lowering stress and finding solutions to everyday problems. They can offer a multitude of organizational skills and handle multiple problems that arise through the daily struggles of business management.
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