Departmental secretary skills for your resume and career

Knowledge of spreadsheets software such as MS Excel is a commonly sought-after skill. Employers want word processing and spreadsheet skills but often say they want high school graduates and pay accordingly. These skills aren't always taught in high school. Those in the field should seek these skills. Additionally, medical and legal assistants have highly sought after. Terminology courses for these specialized areas are sometimes offered at the vocational schools but are usually offered at the post-secondary level.

Employers have told me repeatedly that soft skills are often the most important. They will ask for my reference after I've gotten to know a student and been able to identify their communication, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. They want someone to take the initiative yet know when to ask questions. Customer service skills and confidentiality were also voiced by our internship supervisors. Verbal and non-verbal communication is a must. The applicant must be able to write well!!

In school, students are often taught to work by themselves. In some cases, they are even penalized for working with others. In some rare cases, students are asked to do a little group work but only for a short amount of time, at the end of their learning in a class.

The first thing that graduates need to know is that the workplace is nearly opposite from school. Employees, especially professional, technical, and content writer jobs, are more often than not collaborative and teams-based. The added wrinkle is that office culture is unlikely to go back to pre-pandemic occupancy rates.

So graduates need to know is that odds are good that at least part of their job will be remote. And that might be the case for at least part of the time. Announcements from tech, finance, and insurance about their latest work-from-home policies keep making the news. So not only are the chances good that they'll be working in teams, their team members and co-workers won't be in the same room with them. They'll be working collaboratively through writing. This is good news for English graduates. Much of the writing someone in a professional, technical, or content writing job are products meant for public readership. Like press releases that are sent to news outlets. But all of that writing is built on a network of notes, memos, policies, and text threads meant for co-workers. Remote work just means that co-workers will be writing each other more and more often. English graduates who can make texts for public audiences and write effectively to co-workers are positioned to do well.


The second thing that students need to know is how to start and stop writing in the context of someone else's draft. They will rarely begin with a blank screen and end with a finished text.

The third thing is that it's likely small businesses will take some time to bounce back. In those workplace settings, it is likely that an employee will need to have a range of knowledge and skills because their job will combine parts multiple roles. So a copywriter in a small marketing firm might need to also know something about SEO and social analytics and visual design. In larger offices, however, jobs tend to be much more specialized and team-based. So graduates need to be comfortable working in teams where they have an assigned role, and they need to be able to receive work in-process, complete their assigned part, and hand that work off still in-process.

And finally, students need to learn how to learn new technologies. Learn just through documentation, without a human tutorial. Even if employees are exclusively using the Microsoft Suite, it will be used for writing, editing, project management. It will be used to collaborate and present. Depending on where a student studies and what classes they take, those digital pieces might not be a part of their coursework. So, at the very least, students need to know that the workforce will constantly ask them to learn new technologies and new uses for familiar technologies.