Reflective Essay On A Secretarial Job

When I first started working, I had no idea how to do a secretarial job. This was probably at least partly due to my mother. She was a secretary for twenty years off and on (whenever the mood hit her), and I remember listening to her talk about her job at the dinner table. She told stories about answering phones, typing letters, and cleaning breakrooms. She was often bored at work, and at one job, she had nothing to do all day but read and pretend to type whenever someone walked into the room (she was typing from the book she was reading). My view of secretarial duties changed during an interview with a woman who had given birth around the same time that I did in February of 1988. When she told me that she had given birth to another child by the end of that same year, I asked her how she managed it all. She gave me a searching look and asked me if I was really interested in being a secretary. When I answered that I had an infant son and would do anything to find a job that paid more than minimum wage, she told me that …show more content…
If it wasn’t for that person showing me what she does in a day, I never would have known how much I was lacking, and I never would have gone to Forsyth Tech. I would probably have ended up taking a minimum-wage job and would never have worked in offices for twenty years. Some of the most important skills I learned on the job, such as the importance of being organized. So many co-workers I’ve worked with take so long to do any assignment, and it’s because they’re so disorganized. They don’t even know where their scissors are, and they need to hunt for a stapler. I can’t imagine working like that. My desk was so organized where I worked, that people would think I had quit. Even though I have the skills now to do any secretarial job, I am starting all over, learning to acquire the skills for my new profession, but I know now that education will result in an excellent