The Place of The Personal Assistants, Secretaries, Administrative and Executive Assistants in the Enterprise Risk Management Framework
Primarily, the job roles and responsibilities of the personal assistants, personal secretaries, executive and administrative assistants are to support their bosses manage the administration, logistics and secretarial functions of the company, thereby helping to improve the workplace productivity, business excellence and conserving their bosses time, energy, effort an attention to focus on more strategic matters.
The roles can be found in the core business operations, support functions and the three lines of the assurance functions in every organisation. At the governance or board level, similar roles called the company secretary exist to support the board and the business administer the corporate governance framework of the organisation.
However, beyond global best practices, the scope of work and modes of operation of company secretaries are driven by laws, regulations, institute of chartered secretaries and corporate governance codes applicable in the domain. As earlier indicated, this blog post will not cover the roles and responsibilities of the company secretaries. Also, the roles and responsibilities of the home and personal care givers whose jobs are also considered as personal assistant category will not be covered in this write up.
It is very important to clarify the differences between personal assistant, personal secretary, executive and administrative assistant. To most people, the difference between the three roles is only in the name or nomenclature of the job title. However, in reality, just like the job titles are different, the work scopes are slightly different with about 95% of the job scopes being similar. In performing the roles, a personal assistant works directly with an individual boss covering both the office and family/personal matters. The executive assistant and secretary work directly with an individual boss strictly for matters relating to the office. The Administrative Office Assistant or Admin officer works directly with a business unit or department or centrally for an entire organisation.