A clearly defined career pathway in all businesses is vital to long-term success.
With a career pathway for all employees, including executive assistants, your business can gain sustainable growth.
Unfortunately, many business owners concentrate on their personal development and need to pay more attention to the development needs of their staff.
You must implement a career development strategy for all your employees to avoid becoming demotivated and seeking alternative employment.
This article highlights some of the essential reasons why having an excellent career path for your executive assistants is fundamental to your company’s health.
Why Should You Plan A Career Path For Your Executive Assistant?
When you hire an executive assistant with determination, enthusiasm and a high skill set, it is a natural progression that they strive to get as high as they can in their chosen industry.
Your aim as a business owner should be to help your executive assistant achieve your company’s ambitions.
However, if clear career pathways are mapped out in your business, your staff will become more motivated, leading to a good working environment.
The admin assistant you hire may display excellent leadership and organisational skills; therefore, you must provide the proper training they require to upskill to become an executive assistant within your company.
A clear executive assistant career pathway requires proper support and training guidance if you want your most ambitious staff to remain loyal to the company.
With the right encouragement and support using interpersonal skills, those in assistant positions can grow their professional development to a level where they become executive support professionals.
Most executive assistants started in general administrative roles and progressed to executive assistant jobs with the proper training and encouragement.
The key is to be supportive and let your staff shadow others in senior positions so that they gradually gain the necessary experience.
Setting The Right Salary Expectations
An employee’s salary level depends on their job type within the business. For example, administrative assistants will be on a lower pay grade than those doing executive assistant jobs.
A person’s pay level must reflect the skill level required from their role in their job description and title.
If an executive assistant starts on a median salary, they can expect a gradual increase in their wage scale if they take on additional responsibilities. For example, they may offer executive support to upper management within the business.
The salary a person can command doing an executive assistant job always depends on the level of qualifications the person has as well as experience doing the role.
If someone has a degree, their entry-level salary will be considerably higher than someone with a high school diploma.
The more closely an executive assistant works with the company directors, the higher their wage will be due to the level of responsibility their role entails.
Helping Assistants Develop The Right Skills
You can expect an executive assistant job description to change over time as the person’s skills and experience develop.
If the executive assistants you hire continually develop their skills, they won’t become stale and unmotivated.
Your executive assistants must display enthusiasm in enhancing their skills as they are responsible for organising online courses for the training development of other company staff members.
Executive assistants must display high emotional intelligence to get the best out of other team members. The last thing you want as a business owner is to deal with an unhappy workforce.
As the business owner, you employ an executive assistant to ensure all other staff members perform to the best of their abilities. Your executive assistant must work closely with your HR department to ensure all staff are happy and any problems are dealt with promptly and professionally.
Adding New Responsibilities
Every business wants to employ enthusiastic staff who want to embrace new opportunities.
Therefore you must allow your administrative and executive assistants to fully develop their skills by adding new responsibilities to their roles for the betterment of your business.
Building the right company culture is vital, and every office environment has a different approach to achieving outstanding results.
Often executive assistants will implement different methods from their experiences working in different environments and merge them to forge the right balance that works for your company.
There is no one size fits all approach to achieving a harmonious working environment, so using a range of excellent strategies is the way forward.
When everybody within your company is confident in their role and can offer suggestions on improving the day-to-day running of the business, it leads to an open and forward-thinking company culture.
Often those people who show initiative and go above and beyond their job description are the ones who desire to further their careers for the sake of themselves and the company.
As a business owner, it is up to you to reward staff members who want to improve your company positively. Giving them recognition for their actions will reinforce their loyalty to your company.
Provide Management Skills Training
Don’t be fooled into thinking that an experienced executive assistant knows it all; there is always room for self-improvement regarding management skills.
As a business owner, you should identify areas where your executive assistant needs improvement and devise a plan of action on how you can help them.
Sometimes business owners and upper management need more people skills and speak to their staff in an abrupt manner, which is never the right approach as all staff and clients must feel valued and respected.
An excellent way to improve your executive assistant’s management skills is to let them shadow a senior manager to learn how they approach certain high-pressure business situations.
Just because your executive assistant may be stressed or under pressure doesn’t excuse them from being disrespectful to staff and clients; this should be avoided at all times.
Using a firm, professional, but courteous approach will earn the respect of your staff, which in turn means they will go above and beyond for the good of the company.
Excellent communication skills go a long way in helping to achieve the desired results, but like with everything in business, we learn best through experience.
As long as you are fair, open and willing to listen, you will always stand a good chance of being successful.
Let Us Help You Find A Virtual Executive Assistant
Hopefully, you will understand the importance of implementing clear career paths for executive assistants in your company.Every career path is different, but having an executive assistant career path is vital to achieving career growth and sustainable success.
You may be too busy to be dealing with phone calls relating to hiring a new executive assistant, so let us do the hard work for you.
Whichever approach you take, our company is experienced in sourcing, intervening, hiring and managing all different types of executive assistants.
Give us a call today to find out how we can help fix you up with an executive assistant who will keep your company running smoothly.