Executive PA Australasia October November 2016 | Page 66

CAREER PA
Career news, advice and insights
PAs down but never out
It was an article of faith during the 1990s that the executive
assistant was an endangered species. This was the decade of
perpetual “downsizing” in search of leaner, flatter, more “efficient”
organisations and “non-productive” assistants were deemed
an easy cut. Coupled with cost-cutting as a blood sport for
swashbuckling CEOs and overzealous bean-counters, advances in
technology also threatened to render the administrative assistant
obsolete. Executives could now do much more for themselves –
they could type and print their own letters, make copies of reports,
design presentation slides, manage their diaries and book their
own travel and accommodation.
In those heady days of cutbacks very few bothered to question
whether saddling executives with these distracting tasks was the
best use of their time.
There were, of course, welcome personal productivity benefits
stemming from advances in workplace technology in the late
1990s and early 2000s. Luddite executives who refused to have a
computer on their desk and insisted they couldn’t get by without
administrative support had lost that argument. Middle to upper
ranks of man