Administrative assistants play a crucial role in keeping a team, department, or office running, often specializing in managing important functions like maintaining files, booking meetings, and greeting visitors so that the people they support can focus on their own specialties. Office assistants are often seen as the “go-to” people in the office. And for good reason—countless tasks and responsibilities fall under their job description.
Being an administrative assistant allows you to flex your organizational muscles, leverage your talent for multitasking, and interact with clients and colleagues at every level of an organization. It can be a fantastic job for someone fresh out of college or returning to the workforce as it allows you to cultivate a diverse array of highly transferable skills. But this field also offers loads of opportunity for growth and variety, enabling you to build a long, happy, and successful career in office support.
Whether you’re just starting out, making a career shift, or looking to develop an already established career in the administrative space, you’ll need a resume that showcases your most relevant skills and transferable work experience.
Here’s how to write a fantastic administrative assistant resume to land your next job.
When you apply to a job online, your resume usually gets submitted to an applicant tracking system (or ATS for short). These programs scan your resume for specific terms (like “administrative support” or “calendaring”) to determine whether or not your experience is a match for the company’s needs. If you don’t have enough relevant keywords on your resume, the ATS might automatically reject your application—even if you actually have the right experience. It’s far from a perfect system.
The good news is there are ways to work with the ATS to ensure that your resume gets in front of a real human. Tailoring your resume to reflect the job duties listed in each posting is a great place to start because it ensures that you’re incorporating relevant keywords.
I know that updating your resume for every opportunity might sound cumbersome, but it’s actually a lot easier than you might think! Just remember this golden rule: If a job duty is listed in a job posting and you have experience performing that particular job duty, then it belongs on your resume.
Another great way to ensure that your resume makes it past the ATS is to incorporate keywords that are common to administrative assistant job postings. Here are a few examples to get you started:
While administrative skill sets are highly transferable from one company or industry to the next, administrative assistant jobs aren’t one size fits all. So in addition to reading up on your work experience, recruiters might be especially interested in learning additional details about your past jobs, like:
Take a look at the example resume below to see how you can seamlessly incorporate these details into your own resume.
What's the best job for you?
Use The Muse to find a job at a company with a culture you love. Select the career path that aligns with you:
