(i posted this in MPSIMS, but I think it may have been the wrong subthread)
Long time lurker, first time poster. Please be gentle! (if this isn’t the right forum, please accept my apologies!)
I am looking at a career change on a radical scale. I was a liberal arts major in college, so there is no business/accounting/marketing/data analysis/what have you experience to speak of, officially. I took some courses on some of these topics, but, I am not an economics major and I don’t have a BBA.
I am looking at entry-levels job at a larger corporation as an administrative assistant. Yes, secretary. Not glamorous, I know.
I don’t mind starting at the bottom, but I don’t know if administrative assistant experience is transferable to “non-secretarial” positions, or if they even count as relevant experience for that kind of work (e.g. if you work as an admin assistant in a marketing department, in 3 years will you have “3 years of experience in marketing”?) if you’re ever looking at another job with another company.
So, I’m basically looking to see if administrative assistantdom is a good way to get in on the ground floor in an endeavor to make a career change.
From what I can tell, 3 years as an admin in marketing (or wherever) will get you three years experience as an admin if you ever want to try to get another admin job.
If you want to move up eventually admin is not the best first stop idea. Look for positions with titles like coordinator or program assistant or associate. These tend to be entry level with room for growth.
The upside of taking the admin asst. position is that it’s probably easily to get that job than a more technical title, and once you are inside you can show them what you’ve got and keep your eye out for advancement opportunities.
At the large corporation I work at, there is no career path for administrative assistants to move into other positions. In a small company, things may be more flexible.
This can definitely vary from company to company, even large ones. Where I currently an employed is a fairly large (20,000+) multi-national company and one of our senior VPs started here as an admin assistant. Of course, she has the intelligence and talent, but her starting position was not a handicap later on.
One thing that is often done here (and may be possible at other large companies), is to take advantage of training and tuition reimbursement to work toward a different role. We have several career admins, but we also have had quite a few that took classes or sought certifications and then applied for a new position later on. I think that if the benefits package at a company does include training/tuition, it is generally a good sign that there is a possibility for advancement into different career tracks.
If you take an AA job, and show great competence at doing it, you have no prospect for advancement. It’s like accepting the promotion to head of the mail room. Dead end. Do it for the experience, then look for a new job.
Moving up can be done, but I think it’s more likely to be a dead-end. It’s probably better than nothing, especially in some specialized industry, but you’ll need a decent story for why you started out as a secretary instead of entry-level skilled/career position. If you can say you did AA work for a year because you were taking care of your dying mother or something, but now you have the time and energy to really devote yourself to a professional position with the basic knowledge gained from your AA experience, you might be a good hiring prospect.
At my company ($4 billion in revenue, 20K employees) admins who are generally competent and who want to advance seem to move onward and upward frequently. They have a couple of advantages due to their position. They report directly to a VP or higher, and they know pretty much everyone. The most frequent move I’ve seen has been into project management.
This does happen. But in many situations, the person a competent AA works for does not want to let a competent AA go and have to deal with a replacement, and will sometimes block any transfers or promotions. At a large company like yours, this may be less likely to happen.
I used to work in a midsize firm in which all entry level positions were basically admin assistants. There was plenty of opportunity to be promoted, although there was a general expectation that one would put in 2-3 years as an assistant before moving up to the next rung. Based on the previous replies, it sounds like the answer to your question varies a lot by the specific culture of an organization.
I have worked in HR and it really depends on your company.
For instance, I worked for one company that had a policy where every single job, regardless, had to be posted over the corporate board and publicly
This assured that our company got the best candidates. But it also severely limited the chance for advancement.
Because now you were going to have to compete against, those from outside as well. And our company had excellent pay and benefits, so we managed to steal a lot of people, but they rarely advance, within the same branch. The advancement came by switching branches.
It really is who you know. Taking an aa job and getting in good with the boss can help you get an in at least in some companies. And it is usually easier to get a job with a company when you’re already there, but not always.
If you do take the job find out what other have advanced to. In my above example our hiring manager was proud to point out 75% of postions were filled from within, but in reality that was misleading. They were filled by people transfering from other branches. We only had two people in our branch that ever got a promotion from that branch and stayed within that branch.
I don’t think the OP is asking about the prospects of advancing within his own company, but rather if the expereince working as an AA in a marketing company would help him land a future job as something other an AA with another company.
And I think the answer is that it depends on what your duties are and what experience you gain. If you make copies and fetch coffee, it probably won’t help. If you do research, write reports, interact with clients, etc., then it probably will.
If this is the case then it will work provided two things happen.
First she had to be on great, not good, not favorable but great terms with her boss.
She will need someone who likes her so much the boss is going to go out of his/her way for her
Second she’s going to have to put in a lot of unpaid overtime and not gripe about it. Not put in for extra money, even when it’s deserved.
Third go to ever single company function. Better yet plan then as well as attend. Take up golf or bowling or darts or whatever. Make sure your noticed to everyone.
But all this won’t help much if you can’t get that connection with that one person in that company who’ll go to bat for you
I’ve worked in a few big companies, and what I have seen is that some admins move up as admins, eventually moving up to be pretty well paid for supporting important people or groups. So there is some room for advancement, but not to something else, just to a more important admin. It seems like this would be a strategy of riding out a lot of attrition and maybe kissing some pretty serious tuchus, but I know it can be done in the right circumstances.
I think the job might be worth taking even so, if the company has benefits that can help the OP move up and on to other positions, though. Tuition assistance can help earn a degree that is more directly applicable to something more interesting. One company I worked for had an in-house training program to get people in non-technical roles education and experience in technical jobs - several people I know came through that program and became IT people.
So to echo what others have said, it depends on the company and how they treat their people. In the right place, even if direct advancement isn’t possible, the company can be used to provide indirect advancement opportunities.
My company is a division of a S&P 500 company, and at one point our CEO was a woman who had begun in the firm as a secretary.
There are also a couple of other secretaries in my local practice here who moved into professional roles.
No doubt it depends on the company. But it also helps to exude competance. If you’re just doing an OK job as secretary, you’re going to have a hard time. If people come to think of you as a very capable person, you’ll have a much easier time of it.
The largest company I ever worked for had <150 employees, so take that for what it’s worth.
Yes, I’ve often seen AA’s promoted to professional slots. BUT, they had degrees in the field, made it clear they wanted to move that way, and were willing to do non-AA things to get there. They wrote reports, staffed out-of-town events on evenings and weekends, worked directly with clients and generally thought of their AA job as a paid internship.
Then there were the AA’s who wanted a day job in a comfortable environment, at an industry-standard salary and had no higher aim than to do a good job and be acknowledged for it. They might hang around a few years until something better came along. A few of them eventually got promoted to office manager.
The moral is to tell your prospective employer what you want and make sure it dovetails with what they have in mind for you.