Beware of Golden Handcuffs

All Posts, Tales from the Trenches, (0) Comments

Submitted by Ethan on April 29, 2009 at 06:40 PM

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.

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.