How Administrative Professionals Can Grow Their Careers by Pursuing Education

April is Career Administrative Professionals Month, a time to celebrate the hardworking administrative professionals everywhere who keep organizations running. Angela Elliott, an HR manager with Hormel Foods, recently explained how administrative professionals can pursue higher education and further their careers with support from tools like Workforce Edge.

How have you seen administrative professionals contribute to the success of teams within your company?

Administrative professionals are some of an organization's biggest drivers of progress. Each administrative professional brings a unique skill set to the table, and organizations can harness those superpowers to create high-performing teams. 

Administrative professionals are great problem-solvers, overcoming challenges daily and using their resourcefulness, interpersonal skills, and technological proficiency to help their teams. Also, their attention to detail helps facilitate more efficient and productive meetings and interdepartmental communication and alignment. They also ensure that teams and their projects stay on track.

How have administrative responsibilities and skills played a part in your career journey?

Many people may not know this about me, but I started my corporate career as an administrative assistant in a large telecommunications call center. I eventually migrated to the human resources department. Here, I recognized my passion for working with, and in service to, my organization’s team members. This led me to managing the programs and events within another organization’s education and development department. I managed vendor relationships, coordinated all the logistical needs for the training workshops, and tracked expenses for the department’s training budget.

For those who excel in administrative work, what kind of career opportunities would you consider to be a natural next step?

Some other career areas that administrative professionals could consider include the following: 

Human resources

• Benefits coordinator 
• Change management specialist 
• Diversity, inclusion and equity coordinator 
• Environmental, health, and safety coordinator 
• Talent acquisition specialist or recruiter 
• Talent onboarding specialist or coordinator 
• Technical writer 
• Training and development specialist 
• Training facilitator 
• Payroll specialist 

Customer success

• Account manager 
• Business development coordinator 
• Client onboarding specialist 
• Client relations manager 
• CRM administrator 
• Customer experience analyst 
• Product support specialist
• Vendor management/purchasing coordinator 

Legal

• Contracts administrator 
• Internal/external audit coordinator  
• Legal assistant 
• Paralegal  
• Policy analyst 
• Risk management specialist 

Corporate communications

• Community outreach coordinator 
• Corporate responsibility coordinator 
• Digital content creator 
• Event planner or manager 
• Grants manager 
• Public relations specialist 
• Social media content or web content specialist 

Operations management

• Export-import coordinator
  
• Facilities or commercial real estate coordinator
  
• Inventory control specialist
  
• Logistics coordinator
  
• Process improvement specialist
  
• Procurement analyst
  
• Project manager
  
• Scrum master
  
• Supply chain coordinator

Hiring managers and HR professionals often look for specific skills connected to open roles. How would you recommend that an administrative professional promote their skills as transferable to other roles?  

My best advice is to try to quantify what sets you apart from other candidates and tie your accomplishments to business outcomes. 

Here’s an example related to my earlier story about being an event program manager. On my resume, rather than listing the job duty as, “planning the hotel logistics for training programs,” I might instead say, “negotiated lodging contracts for X # of events, decreasing lodging expenditures by 8% or $12,000 from the prior year.” 

Now, if the next role I’m looking for is a vendor management coordinator, with this updated information on my resume, the hiring team can see that I have experience negotiating with vendors, which is a valuable skill set for this role. They can also see I’m skilled enough at negotiations to save my previous organization money, which would set me apart from other candidates.

How can pursuing education help administrative professionals grow their careers?

When I teach others about the fundamentals of professional development, I share that it is accomplished through the three Es: exposure, experience, and education.

• Exposure: One of the great outcomes of being an administrative professional is the exposure someone in that position gets to so many different areas of an organization. From IT to purchasing to human resources, administrative professionals collaborate regularly with several teams with different functional responsibilities. 
• Experience: During projects, administrative professionals gain valuable experience managing projects, resources, timelines, and budgets.  
• Education: Once an administrative professional can identify an area they would most like to explore for their career path, they can use external professional development resources to start incorporating the educational elements.  

By seeking out more formal education as part of their professional development, administrative professionals highlight their initiative, resourcefulness, commitment to having a growth mindset, and adaptability and resilience. These are skills many employers look for in quality candidates.

Do you recommend any specific classes or degree programs?

Mastering subjects such as the ones below can provide a great mix of skills that can help administrative professionals stand out from other candidates:

• Creating and presenting engaging presentations (PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva, etc.) 
• Harnessing the power of Microsoft Excel, from the essential functions to the more advanced 
• Storytelling with data, and the tools used to create powerful data visualizations, such as Tableau 
• Project management fundamentals 
• Business acumen 
• Business writing and grammar 
• Generative artificial intelligence fundamentals and prompt engineering 

From a more power skills perspective, most people can always benefit from continuous learning in the following areas:

• Emotional intelligence
• Resilience
• Diversity, equity and inclusion
• Networking and personal brand management

How can companies better support administrative professionals – and all employees – in accessing their education benefits?

Human resources and internal corporate communications teams must regularly market these educational resources and benefits to their team members. They also need to familiarize direct-line people leaders with these benefits so they can guide their team members to these resources as needs arise.

Employers need to discover their team members’ barriers to accessing these resources and work diligently to remove or lessen them. Leaders should encourage their employees to expand their knowledge, skills, and abilities to help meet their organization's growing needs before the need arises. This may require that team members be afforded time to participate in professional development learning opportunities and have that time considered an investment in the team member, just as we would an investment or maintenance in any other business resource.

Ready to start learning? If you’re already signed up for Workforce Edge and ready to continue your education, find your employer and login link here.