Development of specific skills helps personal assistants and secretaries to build spectacular careers early.

To gain essential skills, consider joining Foundation Skills for Personal Assistants and Secretaries Training Course offered by pdtraining in Sydney and other cities in Australia.

A personal assistant is required to carry out a variety of responsibilities. To fulfil each duty successfully, you need to manage yourself, others and the various tasks assigned to you. Management and organising skills are, therefore, a must for retaining clarity, handling conversations, receiving and storing new information, retrieving old information, and fulfilling commitments.

1. Prioritising

Before organising comes prioritising. Before you choose certain spaces for the storing of particular documents, such as creating electronic folders for storing files, you need to categorise them according to importance.

Prioritising will help you to create categories (Urgent, Important, Less Important, Frequent, Yearly) under which you can keep different files. Be it electronically shared information or information on paper, create a system based on priority. It will help you to keep the stored information neatly classified.

2. Organising Work

Even though putting a paper in its designated folder takes up a little more time than putting it into the top drawer, retrieving that piece of paper from among a hundred others will take up a lot of time. As a personal assistant frequently needs to retrieve information, a disorganised workplace can mean chaos and lack of efficiency.

A personal assistant must create a specific system of organising for different platforms. For example, for organising emails, you may create different folders to categorise emails, and you use software to manage messages. 

Technology can make organising immensely easy, but you will need to create and update that system to keep information organised and easily available for retrieval.

3. Organising Workspace

Along with keeping electronic files and communications organised, keeping your physical space organised is equally important. To do that, remember to:

Create folders with name tags

Keep files in drawers specifically used for them

Select the most accessible spaces for frequently used objects

Keep the important in your vicinity

Not allow your personal things to block important spaces

An organised workspace is one where you have a mind map of the things you may need in the near future. If you are spending time to recall where you had kept a file (electronic or physical), you need to work on organising. When you have specific spaces for specific things, and you have stuck to that system of organising for a long time, your mind will automatically create a map of it. You will then not need to spend a second in remembering where you kept what.

4. Communicating

Some jobs require communication skills more than others. For a personal assistant or secretary, having excellent communication skills is vital. Whether it is communicating with the boss, with the company clients, customers, suppliers, partners, employees, or with the senior management of the company, you need to know what to say, how to say it and when to say it.

As a personal assistant represents a company to many people, effective communication is a must to build the professional image of the company.

5. Managing Yourself

There will always be difficult times, situations that worry you or cause damage. Expecting them and preparing them will help you to handle them successfully, and reduce their negative impact on you and others.

Developing confidence, the ability to handle difficult people and situations, managing stress, and creating a healthy balance between work and life will make your journey as a personal assistant pleasurable and productive.

These basic and immensely important skills learned and practiced by personal assistants and secretaries can quickly make them gain expertise in their job.

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Pdtraining delivers 1000’s of professional development courses each year in Brisbane, Sydney, Parramatta, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra and Perth, so you can be assured your training will be delivered by a qualified and experienced trainer.

All public Foundation Skills for Personal Assistants and Secretaries Training courses include am/pm tea, lunch, printed courseware and a certificate of completion.  Customised courses are available upon request so please contact pdtraining on 1300 121 400 to learn more.