Skills Check
Skills Check offers articles to help you boost your skill set with technology tips and shortcuts; communication strategies to improve presentations; self-assessments on work- and career-related topics; problem-solving techniques; and negotiation tactics on how best to deal with bosses, co-workers, clients and vendors.
Building skills should not be a random effort to pile more onto a résumé. Unsure where to target your efforts? Here are a few ways to identify skills that might benefit your repertoire.
When it comes to small talk, some people get it and some people don’t—or do they? Here are the five stages of conversational intelligence.
Are you proficient at Microsoft Office? If you have been in the administrative profession for even a few years, you probably feel fairly confident responding, “Yes.” Here are a few features you should be able to use with ease in order to be considered truly proficient.
Working in a law firm requires all the usual administrative skills, but it also calls for a closer focus in some areas that some admins aren’t quite prepared for.
Administrative professional career development and career satisfaction are greatly enhanced by professional training. Honing your skills keeps you competitive and ready for advancement.
You are a top-performing, high-achieving assistant who has accomplished much. So where do you go from here? What might be missing from your bag of skills?
Here is a glossary of terms you can use to increase your cyber vocabulary, from www.ourcommunity.com.au.
Megan Trzcinski of LaSalle Network urges admins to remember these skills that can’t be taught from a textbook.
Next time you’re preparing for a moment in the spotlight, rehearse in front of a video camera. Then view the video, staying as objective as possible. “People will judge you by your appearance and your body language. And they’ll do it quickly,” says Carol Kinsey Goman, executive coach and author of The Nonverbal Advantage.
Sometimes it’s worth taking a hard, honest and brutal look at our soft skills. As administrative professionals, we often worry more about keeping up our technical skills, while our interpersonal and self-management attributes end up on the lower rack of our administrative toolkit.
Julie Perrine, founder and CEO of All Things Admin, reminds us that dropping someone into your job for even a few days is twice as complicated as you think it is, and she won’t let you take carefully organized procedures for granted.
They’re out there, hiding, ready to sneak up on your document and make it look amateurish. Can you stop them before the damage is done?
To get the information you really need to do your job well, you have to listen—not just “hear,” but really listen. How’s your approach to active listening? Take this quiz and find out:
