Executive PA Australasia October November 2016 | Page 64

PA PROFILE
HATS OFF TO
WINNING EA
Up and Coming PA of the Year 2014
Meghan Beattie talks about her career from concierge,
to EA to a CEO, and how she’s worked hard to stay ahead of the game
WHEN MEGHAN BEATTIE
moved from ANZ Bank working with
eight thousand people to a role where
there were less than one hundred, she
had no idea the doors it would open.
Having completed three EA maternity
leave positions at the bank, and taking
out Up and Coming PA of the Year 2014,
she’d been looking for a change and
when the job at much smaller company,
DFP Recruitment Services came up, it
seemed just the ticket.
Meaghan says she immediately clicked
with the CEO Robert van Stokrom.
“I thought it’d be a great chance to
work for a CEO in a much different role.
It’s a much smaller organisation and
was quite an eye opener how different
it was for getting approvals. I was used
to a process of seven people, and here I
just say to my CEO ‘can I do this’ and it
just happens.”
She says while it didn’t seem right
at the start, given what she was used to,
she’s now loving the new job.
“It’s very much about the people and
when I met with the CEO in the interview
I thought he was someone I could work
with, and it’s quite strategic which is
good. IN ANZ you had a team to help
with everything, where here you get the
opportunity to get stuck into different
areas like events.”
She says her day-to-day responsibil-
ities vary significantly.
“I’ve just got back from Port Douglas
helping minute a board meeting and
strategic board session and my boss gets
involved in sponsorship opportunities and
is on various boards so it’s quite diverse.
We have a sponsorship arrangement with
the Victorian Chamber of Commerce
and Industry and I manage all event
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Meghan Beattie and her CEO Robert van Stokrom
co-ordinations, our own conferences,
social events and travel.”
After being nominated by her former
boss at ANZ for Up and Coming PA of
the Year 2014, and winning, Meghan won
a scholarship for a Graduate Certificate
in Business Management at Swinburne
University of Technology, which she’s
just completed and says it’s been
invaluable to her new job.
“It was a business management
stream and you had a lot of people
specialising in a lot of areas. It was good
to be able to work with people across
completely different industries, but at the
end of the day all of the work you put in
was based on your own experience in the
work place .. so we learn the same theory,
but base it on our own work.”
She says while her social life certainly
suffered, she did quite a bit of the
certificate after work, as well as weekends
and that “wasn’t such a bad thing”.
“I was able to bring all of the subjects
back to my day-to-day work. The last
subject was project management and I
was managing our head office move, so
to be doing both at the same time I was
taking the theory I was learning and
using in the project at the time.”
She says winning the Up and Coming
PA of the Year Award was “so nice given
being an EA can be quite a thankless role.”
She says the prize was timely as she’d
been looking at furthering her learning
but wasn’t able to find anything which
would best suit her working life – and on
finishing it, it was great for her family to
be at her graduation.
“My mum and sister were there and they
watched how hard I worked and so it was
quite rewarding to them, and my partner
said ‘now you have your life back’!” E