Assistant to Assistant Professor

I hope people don’t call me elitist when I claim that most people with high school education could easily do administrative assistant job. Primarily all they have to do is keep track of paperwork – like travel reimbursements, schedules, purchase orders, that kind of stuff. It’s not that complicated, but it’s not a good position for chronic procrastinators or disorganized people. And yet they do lose things, or forget about what they have been asked to do on regular basis – it’s almost as if the ONLY people hired into these positions are disorganized procrastinators.

I’ve survived four departmental administrative assistants in the 10 years I’ve been in my current job. Three have been pretty good, and one was hopeless. (There are other support staff, too, though there are times where they are support in name only). I remember trying to train hopeless to keep track of purchases in our database, with the idea that I would do less purchasing and more physics. Everything was set up — all of the codes and categories — so all that was required was data entry and the paperwork. The computer for the data was in hopeless’s office, but we had a program that would allow others to access the computer, and you would see the actual screen in real time. More than once I logged on while hopeless was doing some data entry, and some part of the entry would be wrong — some typo so that the program didn’t recognize some piece of data. There would be a popup that asked “XXX is not in the system. Would you like to set it up?” And I’d watch, in horror, as the cursor moved to “YES” and was then clicked. It got to be like yelling at the TV screen during a bad movie (or football), only instead of “Pick up the gun, you idiot!” (or “Throw it out of bounds! Not to the other team!”) it was “No! No! Click NO! Auuugh!”

I’d eventually go back and fix the bad entries, and learned to just not watch the horror as it unfolded. Turns out that not much of my time was saved, when all was said and done.

JaneDoh, in the comments, adds

[W]hen I worked in a govt lab, I did as much of my own paperwork as possible, including travel arrangements, travel reimbursement, entering orders into the computer system, and sending important faxes. I didn’t trust our admin with ANYTHING.

The government (or at least my little corner of it) has moved away from the model of having someone arrange travel and do reimbursements. It’s done online these days, so you have to do it yourself. Our current departmental assistant is so overworked as it is that I do all this other “important” stuff myself anyway. It’s not a lack of competence that would delay these things getting done, it’s the huge stack of other work that also has to be done.

As far as the sentiment that anyone with a high school education can do this, I don’t know — I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. There’s all this empirical data (anecdotal though it may be, it does establish that these people exist). And were I to transform myself into Pedantic Man, I would point out that anyone with a college degree possesses a high school education — they just have more. Incoherent Ponderer, presumably, has the requisite education, but went on and obtained advanced degrees. So are we counting everyone who graduates high school? Because it’s a tough sell to get that potential future PhD to want to be an office assistant. Or anyone else who aspires to another job, for the challenge, pay or whatever else they happen to desire in their employment.

What is really being requested here is someone who has a high school education, is capable of more — they have the intelligence, maturity, drive, etc. — but for some reason never moved on and up, and yet are fulfilled doing a job that we’re all complaining about but don’t want to do ourselves. Somehow I don’t think there’s a huge pool of these job candidates out there. I think we’re stuck with the reality that the more competent a person is, generally, the higher they will rise. And as long as office assistants are not valued (market-wise) particularly highly, we’re stuck with what we can get. If you have a good one, consider yourself lucky.