Top 15 Administrative Skills to Stay Top of Your Career

This post presents important administrative skills and qualities you need to develop to be effective and successful in your career as an administrator.

Please, read on:

For the success of activities in the organization to take place, there is the need to be organized and proactive in the handling of events through proper planning and setting in motion the plans that have been made.

This is primarily the work of an administrator in an organization.

An administrator will need some administrative skills to be able to carry out these specific tasks.

What are Administrative Skills?

Administrative skills are certain qualities one need to complete tasks in relation to business management.

These tasks might include paperwork and setting up schedules for meetings.

Here are important administrative skills and qualities you need to develop to be successful in your career:

Excellent IT skills
Good communication skills
Organizational skills
Time management
Strategic planning
Resourcefulness
Detail oriented
Problem solving skills
Team work
Customer service skills
Responsibility
Goal driven
Independence
Social media management
Forward thinking.

Excellent IT skills

Working as an administrator is quite demanding to say the least.

It is a job that takes time and energy to keep things going smoothly in the organization.

You certainly need excellent knowledge and skills in IT to excel on the job.

Having knowledge of how to use Microsoft suite will definitely be helpful to you in carrying out your job with more efficiency.

Microsoft suite is a complete package for anyone who works in the position of organizing activities.

This is because, in the Microsoft suite, you have different applications or software tools, which help you to perform most functions you would have carried out manually.

So, it is a form of automating your job, and with that getting more efficient and faster results.

Good communication skills

Communication within the organization is one way to maintain free flow of information within the organization.

It is also a way of maintain a working relationship between employers and employees, as well as within employees or team of workers in the organization.

Since you are in a position of planning the course of events in the organization, it is ideal to maintain good communication within the organization to notify every staff of the nature of the work for that day.

Also, communicating with other members of the organization is a way of creating an avenue and platform for team spirit.

This will in no doubt help you in your job to make sure activities in the organization are handled as a team.

Organizational skills

Administrative skills won’t be complete without special mention of the role of organizational skills.

There is always the need to be well detailed in the activities of the day and arranging and prioritizing the activities to be in line with the organizational goals.

So, your duty as an administrator at any level or department, you must be well detailed in your planning as well as your organization of events in your care.

It is required that you develop the capacity to organize the organization’s events, schedules, and calendar.

You have to know what to do and when to do it.

You also work with the team to ensure that the events, calendar, and schedules are maintained to prevent backlog of events or schedules.

This may affect the output of the team and may dent your personality by not being able to coordinate the affairs of the organization.

Time management

This is one aspect of administration that needs to be taken seriously. Time like they say waits for no one.

This means that every minute in the organization must be put to efficient use and that should start from the moment of planning.

Time management is always a product of strategic planning without which there won’t be purpose for events in the organization.

This is why the administrator must be good at managing projects to ensure that deadlines are met.

To make judicious use of time in the organization demands that there is a plan in place for every event, schedule or calendar.

Adequate preparation for events will definitely help in maintaining timing for every activity in the organization.

Strategic planning

As discussed earlier, for time to be well managed in the organization, effective and strategic planning must be put in place to decide the fate of every activity in the organization.

This is why there is always the need for a good administrator to man the affairs of the organization.

Good planning is important if any organization must achieve its short and long term goals.

This planning is what will predict the outcome of events and what the position of the organization should be if it really wants to stand a chance to succeed in the future.

There is no replace of strategic planning in administration.

You can’t have a good control of the outcome of events in the organization if you are not able to plan the course of events and make predictions based on the plans you have on ground.

Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness in administration is the ability to make out a positive result from every circumstance or situation.

This is the true test of the ability of anyone in the position of an administrator.

They must be able to make out something even out of tight and ugly circumstances.

This is a product of long years of expertise in this field.

With expertise, most of the turn of events and happenings within and outside the organization will surely not come as a surprise but as a repeat of what might have happened in the past.

With this experience, the administrator should be able to tackle the problem without much ado.

This is why experience counts in this role.

Though some challenges that may come may be different to what might have happened in the past, yet experience will bring about resourcefulness on the job.

Detail oriented

Errors and mistakes are all part of the job we do every day. It is not always a case of carelessness or oversight.

It could be errors done out of pressure and physical fatigue.

This is possible and should be treated as such. It is one of the things we watch out for on the job.

For an administrator, he/she should be detail oriented to notice oversights, errors, and relative mistakes in the course of going through documents, and effecting the necessary corrections.

So, this means he/she has to be good at being observant to minute details.

If an administrator always finds him/herself unable to spot errors or mistakes that are minute, it means that he/she is not detail oriented or he/she is not careful enough to notice mistakes in some documents in his/her possession.

Problem solving skills

There is no way that your job starts and ends with only analysis of trends in the company.

You need to be able to bring about lasting solutions or suggestions to bring an end to some ugly trends in the organization.

This is what an administrator should do always.

The reason you are appointed as an administrator is the vacuum of administration that needs to be filled.

And this is because of the important role administration plays in the execution of daily activities in the workplace.

So, there is no running away from having problem-solving skills.

Your problem solving skills are tested in your ability to fulfill your job description and fill that vacuum in the workplace due to the need for a competent administrator.

Team work

The role of team work cannot be over emphasized in any organization.

This is because, when everyone in the organization sees themselves as part of the team, there is a big chance of the organization achieving its short and long term goals without difficulties.

One person that should see him/herself as part of the team is the administrator.

He/she is to collaborate with others in the organization to make sure that activities go smoothly as expected.

If he/she doesn’t do that, he/she is going to bring down the team spirit in the organization and will likely discourage others from imbibing team spirit.

This will surely tell on the general and departmental output of the organization.

Customer service skills

Many people think that customer service skills are only for people who sit at the front desk of the organization with the title of receptionist.

But that is not so.

Customer service skills are for everyone in the organization.

As an administrator, the basic customer service skills you should have should be to anticipate questions, enquiries, and complaints that may be directed at you by the clients of the organization.

You will need to be in the right state of mind to make sure you don’t sell the wrong impression to the clients about the nature of the organization you are representing.

Remember that enquiries and questions may come from outside the four walls of the organization.

Responsibility

Responsibility entails knowing the details of your job and doing all that you can to ensure that those descriptions in your job are fulfilled to the best of your intellect and strength.

This is what we call responsibility.

For anyone in this role, there are specific and general duties assigned to them.

This is what he/she should be mindful of and strive to fulfill.

So, if you are working in an administrative role, you should have your primary role(s) in mind and work with that.

Leaving the details of your job and doing whatever you like is not a good work ethic.

Your job description should be your guide inside and outside the organization.

You should be able to do what is demanded of you by your employer because therein lies your promotion.

Goal driven

There is your goal and there is the goal of the organization or team.

This is what will be used to evaluate your success in the organization and nothing short of that.

Understand that your role or job as an administrator plays a major part or role in the actualization of the organization’s goals.

If you are not well detailed about your job, then you may find yourself doing what will bring down the organization in no time.

That is for the organization’s goal.

Your personal goal is one thing that will spur you towards pushing for the team goal, knowing fully that your personal goals is to an extent connected to the overall organization’s goals and objectives.

Independence

No employer wants to have an employee who only works when he/she is monitored.

This means that the employee has weak or bad work ethics.

This should not be your case. You should be able to work with little or no supervision as this shows that you have an excellent work ethics.

As an administrator, you should be disciplined enough to do your job not out of fear of punishment for not doing it, but out of passion and love for the job.

This is what will help you do what is right in the organization.

It is a good sign of excellent work ethics for you to be able to carry out your job without being remotely controlled or compelled to do so.

As earlier stated, no employer is ever willing to have such employee in his/her payroll.

You have to be up and doing as long as you find yourself in the organization.

Social media management

These days, the activities of an organization have gone far beyond the confines of the physical restrictions of the four walls of the organization.

Many organizations have most of their interactions with clients and potential clients through the social media.

This directly entails that the role of the administrator should also involve the management of social media presence of the organization.

He/she may be required to form part of the IT team of the organization in order to coordinate and organize the affairs of the organization online.

This makes it important for the administrator to sharpen his/her IT skills to be able to work effectively as part of the IT department of the organization.

If you want to be in the administrator’s role in the modern day organization, there is no way you shouldn’t have excellent IT skills.

Forward thinking

Organizing the activities of an organization needs a lot of forward thinking ability from the administrator.

This is because the administrator has to consider future events or schedules in order to fix activities to meet up with the organization’s timing of events.

Forward thinking also entails having the future in mind while making plans.

The administrator takes note of the organization’s goals and objectives and what activities or meetings that will be relevant, for the organization to achieve their goals and objectives.

Forward thinking demands critical analysis of the past trends and events in and out of the organization, and what it entails for the future of the organization.

The organization’s administrator should be a thinker and should be able to make creative innovations to better the fortunes of the organization through creative thinking.

Administrative Skills for Resume

If you are making a resume/CV for the position of an administrator, you can apply the administrative skills and qualities discussed above in creating a compelling Skills or Competence section for your resume/CV.

When employers/recruiters discover from your resume/CV that you have some of the above skills and qualities, your chances of getting the administrator job are greater.

This is because they are assured that you have the needed administrative skills and qualities to be effective in the role.

Conclusion

Administrative functions are always overlooked by many, but through this write up, you can see that the day to day smooth running of activities in an organization is heavily reliant on the expertise of the administrator.

This article has provided and explained the various major administrative qualities and skills needed to succeed as an administrator.

Taking advantage of these skills and qualities can only make your job better, and most importantly keep you top of your administrator career.