Secretarial Jobs Bristol

To be able to succeed in a secretarial role, you need to be driven, ambitious and highly organised. Your employer will put demands on your time and your patience by requesting an hour long job to be completed in 20 minutes or to organise a table at one of the most exclusive restaurants in the city in short notice. You need to know what your boss is thinking before they know it themselves, and always be ready with anything they need. Whilst this may sound like a nightmare career for some people, for others, there is no more exciting and demanding work than secretarial jobs. Bristol is a city where someone working in a secretarial role can progress up the career ladder, and PA is a respected career among the professionals, knowing that they could not organise themselves as well as their personal assistant can.

But what are the many and varied roles of someone working as a secretary or personal assistant? This can depend on whether you are working for an individual within a company or for the company as a whole, working with many members of staff. The main difference is that you will have to remember the names and details of more people if you work for a department, but it is also likely that there will be at least one other secretary working on the same floor with you. This is beneficial as you can divide the work between yourselves and get a lot more done. If you work for a senior employee alone, you will be responsible for the everyday running of their work life, organising their meetings, phone calls, lunch, a spare tie just in case, jobs that can seem menial at the time but make a big difference to the success of your boss and the company.

There are some jobs that you will find yourself doing on a regular basis, and skills that you will need if you are to be the best secretary or PA you can be. Many are instinctive, like confidence, you either have it or you don’t. If you don’t, you can always work on it, but you won’t survive in the job if you aren’t sure of yourself. So let’s have a look at some of the tasks you will be required to do when working in a secretarial job.

Communicating: with your employee, other members of staff, clients and with enquiries. You will have to email telephone and write to many people on an ordinary day, as often a PA is trusted with their boss’s correspondence, dealing with their email to filter out everything but the most important information. A significant aspect of this communication is networking, so that the most important people with regards to your boss know who you are and that you are the person they should come to when they need answers or want to ask questions.

Organising: meetings, lunch appointments, conference calls, business trips, travel arrangements, accommodation, and the list continues. It will be assumed that your boss is too busy to organise these things for himself, and you will have access to his calendar, probably through Microsoft outlook, so it will be your responsibility to take care of their events. Again, networking can be beneficial here as you will be able to get tables at good restaurants and room upgrades at hotels if you are friendly with the staff and build a relationship between your company and your contacts.

Filing: and so much more. Your desk will become a pile of papers every day and it will take you all your time at work to labour through them. Whilst it may not be the most exiting task you will do in your job, filing, photocopying and typing are an essential factor in the assistance you give your boss. If you can come up with an inventive filing system and strategies that make the everyday working life of your employer easier, you will become a trusted and valuable employee, and you will have more opportunities as you gain more years with the company.

Bristol’s large business sector means that there are many opportunities for people looking to get into secretarial jobs. As long as you can demonstrate your abilities with regards to the tasks noted above, you can go far. Going that extra mile will take you a long way in the world of PA, and you will become a valued member of any team.