Office and Administrative Support Careers

Calling all secretaries, clerks and receptionists. Grab a pad of paper and a pen and meet us in the conference room in five minutes. And make it snappy.

Don’t like getting bossed around? Feel like your magnificent brain is being underutilized? Wish you would have stuck it out in medical school?

Uh…too bad.

Here you are, for whatever reason, and you’re pretty much at the bottom of a very big heap. Above you are all those people with MBAs and other fancy degrees, and every one of them garners more respect—and more money—than you do.

And…it’s not like the low pay is balanced out by your job being particularly rewarding. You’re not saving lives. You’re not changing the world for the better. Not unless you feel strongly that the world has been sorely lacking in color-coded, interoffice telephone directories.

The fact is that most jobs in this field are…just that. Jobs. If you’re looking for a career—something that will sustain you, both emotionally and financially—then you want to be one of the head honchos. Someone who hires administrative support to help them deal with all the niggling minutiae of the daily office routine. Otherwise, you’ll be the one taking minutes in meetings, fetching coffee for the big boss, dictating correspondence. Most of what you do can be done by a monkey of above average intelligence. And, like we said…you’ll get paid accordingly.

The good news is that you don’t need to blow a ton of money on college. (Please note our sardonically judgmental tone here. We think you should go to college.) Office support positions will generally require a high school diploma or equivalent only…and sometimes you might even be able to skate by without that much. In general, it helps to be something of a speed demon on the ol’ keyboard, and you should have at least a working knowledge of things like Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Photoshop. And you should probably know how to put on a pair of pants and tie your shoelaces. But beyond that, there won’t be all that much asked of you…intellectually.

Better to think of something in this realm as a fallback position. Like…if you get seriously burned out on law school or you realize midway through the pursuit of your business degree that you have an unusual passion for data entry. No matter what you do, you’re likely looking at an annual salary in the 25k-35k range, which was really nice money sixty years ago.

Obviously, administrative support is a necessary cog in the machine, and the higher-ups would have a serious problem if they had to type all their own letters and lick all their own envelopes…but hopefully it isn’t your dream to be somebody’s “yes man-or-woman.”

As in:

“Did you pick up my dry-cleaning yesterday?”

“Yes.”

Careers In This Field