Administrative Assistant job description

BLS scopes this occupation by exception: secretaries and administrative assistants except legal, medical, and executive, which makes it the general office series, the assistant attached to a department rather than a courtroom, a clinic, or an executive suite. The work is drafting correspondence, scheduling appointments, keeping paper and electronic files in order, and giving callers the information they need, and there was a lot of it in May 2025: 1,706,790 jobs. Median pay was $47,540; one worker in ten earned under $33,280 and one in ten above $66,350.

Core Duties and Responsibilities

Phones and visitors head the task list: answering, taking messages, transferring calls, greeting whoever arrives, and pointing them the right way. Databases follow, created and maintained rather than merely fed, along with the filing systems, attendance records, and correspondence that keep an office recoverable when someone asks for last March. Scheduling and confirming appointments, maintaining event calendars, composing meeting notes and monthly reports, completing forms to procedure, routing incoming mail, and getting the copier repaired when it fails all belong to the same desk. Some roles extend into payroll, cash handling, and booking travel for the office.

Common Skills and Technologies

Listening and speaking top the skill ratings, with reading comprehension, writing, service orientation, and time management close behind. The named-software list is unusually wide for office work. Excel, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint are what employers request most often, but postings also name Adobe Acrobat, InDesign, Photoshop, and Canva for documents and graphics, Atlassian Confluence and JIRA on the project side, and Cisco Webex, Google Docs, and Google Sheets for collaboration.

Education, Training, and Career Path

Entry is Job Zone 2 territory: high school, then months of learning beside experienced staff, a year at the outside. The hiring-requirement survey stopped at high school for 50 percent of responses, 22 percent said an associate degree, 11 percent a bachelor's, 10 percent some college, and 7 percent a postsecondary certificate. Reported titles run from office assistant and administrative clerk to administrative specialist; executive assistants are a separate occupation.

Sources: O*NET 30.0, 43-6014.00 Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/43-6014.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 43-6014, https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm.