Personal Assistants Skills Training

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Training Australia Wide: Sydney Brisbane Adelaide Melbourne Canberra Geelong Gold Coast

Personal assistants should be a vital staff member in an administrative office. They provide support for all administrative officers' duties, personal and official. They are not like executive assistance who perform all the duties of the personal assistant but not any personal duties to their administrator. Their duties cannot be delegated to one person. It is essential to have a competent personal assistant to assist with all the needs of an administrator, including managing schedules and standing in for them during absences. This course will help you train your personal assistants in the skills required for this position.

Personal assistants are an essential part of any workplace. Without them, administrative staff would not be able to get as far. These techniques will help you train your personal assistants to prioritise organisations, pay attention to details and have technical and communicative skills. This training session is crucial in developing personal assistants that are capable of supporting their administration and, in turn, their company. This session is a good match for sessions on company support, management, and communication. Contact us to learn more about our training courses and other services. This training session can also be customized to fit your team.

Personal Assistants Skills Training Outline

Keeping Things Organised

As a personal assistant, you are meant to be in the service and assistance of the administrative officer you are assigned to, for the good of the office, for better or worse. This usually means having to keep both of you on track and on target for whatever the company requires the administration to accomplish. This means schedule organisation, office organisation, recording meetings, and more. This is where the “secretary” image comes from. A lot of people tend to disrespect or look down on the position of personal assistant as some form of being a doormat, but in reality, personal assistants may yet be one of the biggest reasons administrative officers can do anything in a company. Administration is a big responsibility, and it is very easy for someone to be overwhelmed by the position’s demands; the personal assistant is the one keeping them sane and organised. To do this, the personal assistant must be organised too. The personal assistant observing a regular routine of his or her own can do this, and attain organisation that can be applied to the administrative officer’s schedule and approach to work. A strictly regimented routine that starts as soon as the personal assistant wakes up at 6 AM, for example, always ends in sleep at 10 AM would place a sense of time management and discipline. Train your personal assistants to follow their scheduling religiously, or they can never expect the administrative officer they are with to ever do the same. Organisation is, and always will be, the first step of any successful personal assistant. If you can keep the time of your life in order, then it is that much more likely that you can do so for your officer. Our session develops these areas and more.

Look at the Little Things

Attention to detail is another crucial trait necessary in the budding personal assistant. As a personal assistant, if you slip up on a small detail, it causes a domino effect of miscommunication that makes everyone else in the office affected by you and your administrative officer slip up. This can cause serious inefficiency, and that is the best-case scenario. The worst possible thing is to alienate your officer from his or her colleagues, or even make mistakes that cost your company massive parts of their finances. Paying strict attention to detail in your work is what will prevent these disasters from happening, and keep you, your officer, and your company running as smoothly as possible. Details and little bits of information are the things that can make the difference between getting to an appointment on time, and missing it by an entire day. You can practice observation by taking careful note of particular details in your daily life. Practice memorising landmarks whenever you travel around the area you live in; it will help you remember details of the land around you. You can also try this with various details about people, like remembering what food your manager is allergic to, or how your officer fidgets when situations start to make her nervous. These little details have a lot of impact on the way you remember schedules, meetings, and events from certain conferences. A personal assistant that can accurately recall details is always in a better spot than the one who cannot. We show participants how to become better at recalling events and tasks.

Get Tech Savvy

Half the time, the personal assistant is roaming the office, constantly at the side of his or her assigned administrative officer. The other half of the time, the personal assistant is sitting at their desk, making schedules, receiving emails, answering emails, and writing letters. For all of these to be performed satisfactorily, the performance assistant must be knowledgeable in the necessary software. The personal assistant needs to know email etiquette, and how that applies and differs from other letters, how to keep spreadsheets accurate and updated, and how to use word processing applications in general. If knowledge in basic Microsoft Office tools is a requisite before working in any corporation, then it is even more required in personal assistants, who have to bear part of the administrative burden on their respective officer. Can you imagine for a second, a personal assistant that does not know how to type on Microsoft Word or write an email on Gmail? This requirement for being tech savvy extends to communication in general for the personal assistant, since he or she is meant to fill in for the administrative officer on a number of occasions. It is imperative for the budding personal assistant to practice capable typing, technological understanding, and communication skills in both real life and cyber situations. We discuss some of the basics of technology based on your participant needs.