It’s crazy what executive assistants are asked to do these days, and the degrees they are expected to hold.

Also known as secretaries and/or administrative assistants.

The words don’t matter to me. The fact that I’ve seen job ads for secretarial positions that require a master’s degree is just blasting wonky.

From my own corporate experience and from reading this, it appears that companies are attempting to hire “assistants” to do the tasks that actual well-paid executives formerly would undertake, all for an “assistant” salary. Have seen this myself in the workaday world.

I had a full-time assistant (male, actually) at a job I worked for a year. It was great. I was so vastly more productive as anything that wasn’t my actual job I didn’t have to think about. It was just taken care of.

I got literally ten times as much done that actually helped the company in ways directly related to my role.

Productivity-wise, companies are shooting themselves in the foot by eliminating secretaries and executive assistants.

But it’s more difficult to measure than “firing someone on paper appears to save us $50,000 a year, so we’ll do that.”