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Articles in: Tales from the Trenches

May 08, 2009 at 06:33 PM | (0) Comments

assistants2-screening

Other than Ryan Reynolds in the front row, all the others (mostly men) in the crowd are assistants. On her blog, Deadline Hollywood Daily, Nikki Finke reports about a screening for the new Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds movie, The Proposal, that was screened just for assistants in Hollywood.

The movie’s distributor thought it would be a good PR opportunity to invite assistants to a screening just for them as Reynolds plays an assistant in the movie who is forced to marry his mean boss (Bullock) to keep her from being deported… and we’re pointing it out here as just one of the many perks that an assistant in Hollywood gets; NOT the proposal mind you but the free movie screening.

Perks are a great part of the gig… tickets to Rangers games, concert tickets, parties, gifts given to your boss that they don’t want or need, free lunches, free gym memberships; depending on where you’re working and in what industry, don’t discount the perks.

Through her blog, Nikki highlights the assistant position from time and time like HERE and HERE where she details two of the agencies and the training programs they’ve set up for their assistants. By looking at the “class schedule” though, it seems that these “classes” leave a bunch of important information, tactics and “tricks of the trade” out and given my own experience navigating the treachorous waters of Hollywood as an assistant I’m sure ProAssisting can help you fill that gap!

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Treat your Boss’s expenses as your own…

May 02, 2009 at 06:39 PM | (0) Comments

expenses-fr With the economy turned upside down, everyone these days is focusing on expenses. And companies are tightening their belts and cracking the whip where they may not have done previously.

My company just instituted its first expense policy guidelines. Up until now, they had always expected that employees would be price-conscientious while dining out or choosing a hotel. Unfortunately, people took advantage of this and we were seeing receipts for $1000 bottles of wine and expensive valet parking service on the company dime.

As an assistant, you will likely be reviewing bills for vendors and checking credit card statements for egregious purchases. A great way to view this part of your job is to treat your boss’s expenses as you would your own. Pretty simple.

If your own electric bill suddenly doubled, you would undoubtedly call the provider and find out why. You should take the same responsibility if something looks fishy or out of whack when your boss’s name is on the account. Notice a $4.00 charge on his credit card from an unknown source? Take the five minutes to call customer service and see what it is.

The same thing goes when making purchasing plane tickets or making hotel reservations for your boss. Even though she has made it very clear that she only stays at the Mandarin when traveling to London, if their rate has doubled since the last time she visited, she will want to know that before booking. In email correspondence, just simply noting the rate of hotel rooms, plane tickets, and other purchases is a good practice to get in the habit of.

Your boss may not mention it, but will appreciate that you care about fiscal responsibility. This will show your strong work ethic and respect of the company culture. And in the end, this will be a payoff for you as they know that you truly care about the job that you do and will compensate you appropriately.

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Beware of Golden Handcuffs

April 29, 2009 at 06:40 PM | (0) Comments

Can you have golden handcuffs as an Assistant?

Absolutely.

If you are not looking to be a career assistant, in our training we suggest before you hit your 2.5 year mark working as an assistant that you know where you want to progress to in your career. You then need to take this desire of yours and express it to your boss and human resource department well before an opportunity for you to make a career change presents itself.

If you don’t, you’re going to be type cast as an assistant and it will be much harder for you to make the switch to another position within your current company or at another company as something other than an assistant.

This is just a fact of life in the corporate world: become great at something and that’s what you’ll be known for. To use us as personal examples, both Stephanie and I have turned into career Executive/Personal Assistants. We both love our bosses, we have an immense amount of trust and responsibility placed on us from our bosses and we both get paid very well for our work which has afforded us a great life.

On the flip side though, we both say to ourselves, “What do we want to do when we grow up?”

This post is not meant to scare you away from being a career assistant, it’s just that we want you to be aware of how your boss, you co-workers and others in your industry will view your experience after working as an assistant for an extended length of time; we say four years or longer.

Lastly, we have to remind ourselves at times that our quality of life –which can’t be measured in dollars and cents– is very high for living in New York City AND that we have the time and money to do things like create this course outside of our day jobs… or write the next great American screenplay… or volunteer as a big sister… and having the freedom and time to do those things is very satisfying indeed.

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A “pat on the back” from us to you…

April 22, 2009 at 05:43 PM | (0) Comments

Happy Administrative Professionals Day!

Today is the day when bosses are supposed to pat their assistants on the back for a job well done. In fact, the whole week is supposed to be in recognition of administrative professionals but for us, here at ProAssisting, we’re just focusing on THE day which happens to be today! Happy Earth Day too, while we’re at it!

So please accept a “pat on the back” from us to you and just for good measure, you get a gold star too.

At the advertising agency that I work for, they throw us a breakfast and hand out $50 AMEX gift cards… very nice indeed and we all appreciate the fact that they take the time out and give a great gift to show us that they care but… we are the lucky ones.

You see, it’s the job of an assistant to remind their boss of all the important dates that busy bosses have on their calendars. And if you’re in a smaller company that doesn’t have an HR department to handle such events, the question then becomes: how do you go about reminding your boss that today is the day that they should appreciate you? Our answer to that question is: you don’t.

If you find yourself in this situation, don’t let the fact that your boss doesn’t have a clue that it’s Administrative Professional Day get you down. Take the “pat on the back” from us, the gold star up above and go about your day as any other. You know you do great work, we know you do great work and deep down inside, so does your boss.

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