Admin staff urged to brush up on their skills

People working in admin need to stop undervaluing what they do and push for more training and professional development.

At the Administrative Professionals' Day annual champagne breakfast at the Distinction Hotel yesterday, Association of Administrative Professionals of New Zealand northern regional leader Alexis LewGor, of Rotorua, read a message from national president Sandy Inwood saying people in the sector needed to understand their own worth.

"Sometimes we are so busy with daily tasks, we forget to celebrate ourselves. We need to learn to value our professionalism, invest in our training and actively pursue professional development, making the most of the training opportunities available to us."

Guest speaker Pam Martin, author and co-creator of The Great Kiwi Computer Challenge, agreed.

Martin is on a mission to get people to learn how to use their computers properly and efficiently through training and she told the audience of 175, neither admin staff, nor their employers, fully recognised the need for ongoing development.

"We think [Microsoft] Office has been around forever and we do not need training or we say we are too busy and can't afford to be out of the business. But just because you sit in front of a computer every day, that doesn't mean you know how to use it."

But she pointed to an example from her own experience of how much time is wasted working out how to do things ourselves, in typical Kiwi fashion.

Discovering a rogue bullet point in a 200-page report, she and others in the office spent half an hour trying to bring it back down to the size of its peers. But nothing worked and many suggestions resulted in formating changes in the rest of the document.

"Then one person came in and sorted it in 30 seconds. Think of the time we wasted trying to solve that problem because we did not know how to use the technology effectively."

Martin urged administration staff to ask their employers for the training and development they need and, if their bosses would not pay, to invest in their own learning.