It’s time PAs were recognised as the skilled managers they are, and trained accordingly, writes Penny Whitelock
Personal assistants (PAs) are often the glue that holds a business together – but are they even on your L&D radar?
No doubt your sales managers are trained in sales and management skills, and your accountant team members have technical qualifications and take part in management training too.
It’s high time that PAs were also trained in technical and management skills, so that they can begin to add much greater value to your organisation, and, in turn, be valued more highly by the organisation. There are courses developed specifically for PAs, but I think this fuels the issue rather than calms it. External, as opposed to in-house, training maintains the separation rather than lifts the barriers.
If you want to get serious about training your organisation’s PAs, the results of a recent survey by Practically Perfect PA – which asked PAs to pick the ‘big questions’ they felt needed to be addressed – are illuminating. The top three questions were:
1. How do we get our organisations to value the work that we do?
If you think about the traditional organisation chart, the PA is generally sitting out on a limb as if they are nothing to do with the rest of the business, and therein lies part of the problem.
Having now spent some time talking to PAs, a further question comes up: their job title. There is a clear progression route for most roles, but for PAs there doesn’t seem to be one – so the perception remains that they are just secretaries, with a fixed skillset akin to that of the doctor’s receptionist; ie the gatekeeper.
This is a tremendous waste of skills and knowledge, particularly in companies where there is more than one PA. This collective group have a great deal of knowledge about the issues the business may be facing, which is preventing clear communication across departments. Being sat out on a limb gives no indication of their level of decision-making; sitting them on the line with other line managers makes more sense.
2. How do we ensure that career development is central to the role?
The role – like any other – needs to have a clear set of competencies attached to it. These should measure development, not just in the use of technology, but also in the softer skills of influencing and persuading, handling conflict, finance for non-financial managers and networking. There is no reason why they cannot be included in the same training as any other employee in the organisation – particularly those on management programmes.
3. What qualifications should assistants have?
Quite simply, they need management qualifications. They manage people, they manage information, they manage budgets and they manage resources, so they are managers – and should be developed in the same way.
Penny Whitelock is director of learning and development at Strategi-hr