If you are interested in pursuing a career as an administrative assistant it is important to do some research and find out what employers are looking for. By knowing what skills employers want when they are hiring you can ask yourself the right questions:
What skills do I have? What skills to I need to gain? What skills can I improve on? Do I need to upgrade my education to improve my skills or to develop new ones?
From an examination of ads for admin jobs that were advertised online today I found that the most common administrative assistant qualifications are Word, Windows, and Excel.
Windows is an operating system and it is used more often than any other operating system in offices today. It is also known as Microsoft Windows. The newest version is Windows 7 and while there are still bugs to be worked out people are generally saying that it is much better than Windows Vista. Windows Vista has been around for awhile now and most people are comfortable with it as many of the problems have been worked out. Windows XP is still being used in many offices today though. It is a good idea to become familiar with at least one of them. If you know one of them fairly well you can learn the others over time.
Word and Excel are two types of software programs that you’ll see in any office that uses Microsoft. They are two programs that you’ll find high on the list of administrative assistant qualifications and you should know how to use them for a variety of tasks.
So, how well qualified are you to work with these programs? Try making a list of the things that you can do with these programs and then do some research online to see what else can be done. You might want to consider taking a business course that will allow you to expand your administrative assistant qualifications.