Technological advances are killing off the personal assistant but a niche will remain for a highly skilled administrative elite.
The secretary is dead. Technology and flat corporate structures have consigned the job to the corner office waste bin. In the future, personal assistants will be constructed from microprocessors and remote controlled. We are halfway there, after all. Want to dial your sales director? Ask Siri. Still determined to retain secretarial services? Then hire a virtual assistant, based in Mumbai or Brooklyn, by the hour.
The secretarial role crystallises fears over creeping automation of white-collar jobs. Once a concern solely for factory workers, today robots are marching into offices. Drawing on ONS data, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of the University of Oxford found that 33,000 secretarial roles had disappeared between 2001 and 2013, a drop of 44 per cent. That was just in London. In the UK as a whole it was a 47 per cent decline, or 163,000 job losses. Much of this can be attributed to the downturn, when employers reduced headcount and required secretaries to work for multiple executives. Research by the Roosevelt Institute, a US non-profit body, found that private sector job losses during the recession particularly hit female support staff whose work was distributed among others.
Despite the economic gloom lifting, automation remains a threat to the secretarial profession. “Secretaries are an occupation where the increasing ability of sophisticated algorithms to substitute for cognitive labour is already being felt,” says Mr Osborne.
This could not be more different from the scenario described in 1961 in US trade magazine Today’s Secretary. The “electronic computer” would allow the future secretary to start work at noon and take month-long holidays. Contrary to the bleak predictions by the Oxford university researchers, this article suggested that secretaries would remain much sought-after.
The truth lies somewhere between dystopia and utopia, believes Lynn Peril, a secretary in California and author of Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office. “It is a profession in decline. In the old sense, yes. But it also offers greater opportunities today.”
One hard-to-replace characteristic of the job is that it gives executives trophy status. As busy-ness is a badge of honour, so too are secretaries.
The secretary’s relationship with technology has not always been vexatious, Ms Peril points out. After all, the typewriter was largely responsible for bringing unprecedented numbers of women into the office from the late 1880s. From the 1970s, early word- processing systems began to make real inroads into what had traditionally been the heart of secretarial work: dictation and typing. “That was a good thing, as it allowed secretarial work to evolve into more varied, managerial tasks, even though it meant less secretaries hired as it also destroyed the one boss, one secretary ratio,” observes Ms Peril.
But like her, many believe there will always be demand for secretarial jobs. “It makes sense for the higher echelons of management to have someone act as a gatekeeper as well as to take care of complex but time-consuming tasks, freeing the boss up,” she says.
Titles mean different things in different offices. Executive assistants may be differentiated from PAs to denote the fact they are called upon to stand in for their boss in meetings. According to the US’s International Association of Administrative Professionals, formerly the National Secretaries Association, college degrees are necessary for high-level assistants.
Victoria Rabin, founder of Executive Assistants Organisation, says technology has made the assistant’s gatekeeping role more important in guarding against the deluge of requests by email. At the very top, an assistant in the US can command $250,000 plus bonus, she says. (The average salary is $50,000 to $54,999, according to the IAAP.)
The top tier “do what it takes to be indispensable”, she says. This requires resilience, communication skills and sacrifice. “You can’t take anything personally - sometimes it’s like being a babysitter.”
Steve Hallam, managing director for secretarial and business support at PageGroup, the recruiter, says diary management is one of the most important roles. “If a CEO isn’t on a plane it can affect the bottom line.”
Sara Everett has been a PA for private equity veteran Jon Moulton for 30 years. He has another PA dealing solely with his Better Capital business. Ms Everett says she has known Mr Moulton so long that she knows how he thinks. “My job grows all the time. I can’t ever see it will be less work.”
Laura Schwartz, a professional speaker who worked for the Clinton administration for eight years, started her career as an assistant, answering phones. She believes that “PAs have been empowered due to cuts” because the job is more creative and less repetitive. However, she warns that one of the pitfalls of the “PA field” is that some assistants start speaking as if they are their boss, which in her case would have been the president.
Zelda La Grange, personal assistant to the late Nelson Mandela for 19 years, says people underestimate the gatekeeper. “It’s a unique job. It’s a job of serving. I had to learn it’s not a popularity contest.”
The relationship for her was transformative. “Growing up in years of apartheid makes you a racist. It was through working for him I realised I’d had a very one-sided view of history.”
The profession remains largely female: 97 per cent of the IAAP’s 15,000 members, for example, are women.
The personal relationship can cause problems, however. One PA, who worked in London for more than 10 years, says working for CEOs can be difficult: “It’s always their way or the highway.” One employer was “inappropriate and hands-on”. When no one was in the office, he would make his move.
More than the sexual harassment, it was the frustration that wore her down. “He’d put me down. He stopped saying thank you.” He would also wait until everyone was sitting down in a meeting before asking her to make him a cup of tea, which she felt was designed to keep her in her place.
Finally, she left. Ultimately, it was the personality of the person she worked for that ended her secretarial career. “He was the last straw,” she notes.
(c) 2015 The Financial Times Limited
27-03-2015