Administrative Skills
As part of our refreshed Learning and Development offer, administrative support staff can now access a range of Administrative Skills, structured around the two strands of Fundamental and Advanced courses.
Designed to ensure staff are empowered to complete their job effectively, these flexible programmes are made up of a series of half-day sessions including topics aimed at developing practical skills relevant to the role such as customer service, note taking and supporting meetings. They also offer skills development around PA Skills, contributing in meetings and providing feedback to others.
This flexible range of learning courses is designed for staff in clerical and administrative support roles and will be offered two-three times each year. Discuss your learning priorities, and agree with your line manager, the most appropriate sessions to support you in your role and to meet your development needs.
You can view the current schedule of courses below and register to attend via iTrent Self-Service
Course Schedule: Administrative Fundamentals
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DELIVERING CUSTOMER SERVICE
Ensuring customer satisfaction and delivering high-quality customer service loyalty is critical to an organisation’s success. Understanding the concept of ‘customer’ in the Queen’s context, and different customer expectations builds engagement and trust. This helps staff deliver consistent yet personalised customer focus within their role and department in Queen’s. In turn this may prevent the escalation of issues and complaints. In this workshop you will consider the competencies and skills to deal with customers effectively. This workshop introduces a simple model to understand customer demands, needs and expectations. It reviews customer communication, standards and responsibilities. It focuses on the individual’s customer care skills within the Queen’s University context.
Date: To be confirmed
Time: To be confirmed
- EFFECTIVE NOTETAKING
Note taking is an important skill for Administrative support staff to improve as part of their overall ‘communication toolkit’. From simple jottings to short hand and digital notes, there are lots of resources and methods to choose from. Meetings require anything from a formal precise record, key points or a table of actions. Regardless of the mechanism, the notes taken are relied upon as a record of communication, commitments and understanding and can help to produce effective and consistent minutes when required. This workshop reviews the needs and circumstances of notetaking. It is linked to minute writing with a focus on the art of taking notes. It can also apply to attending a lecture, meeting, learning event or taking an important and detailed phone call; but the focus here is the taking notes in a meeting. Effective Minute Writing is a related but separate workshop.
Date: To be confirmed
Time: To be confirmed
- SUPPORTING MEETINGS
Meetings are an ever-present part of working life. Today’s fast-paced work environment means meetings can be expensive and time consuming, so they must run efficiently with maximum use of the resources involved. This workshop focuses on the often unseen, undervalued but critical task of supporting meetings. This includes the logistics, planning and communication for the colleagues who chair and participate in meetings. This workshop develops a core checklist for the efficient running of meetings. It equips support staff in the task of planning and organizing groups of people: internal, external and at different levels to achieve meeting objectives.
Date: To be confirmed
Time: To be confirmed
- EFFECTIVE MINUTE WRITING
Minutes are a formal record of meetings. This is part of the ongoing record of discussions, agreements and actions to support meetings, committees and also the related work streams, follow-up communication and team working to achieve specific goals and outputs. People often attend and leave meetings with their own perspectives and misunderstandings can occur. Effective minutes maintain consistency and shared, agreed outcomes. This workshop presumes that participants have a proficiency in taking notes during a meeting and have working samples of their own notes. The session helps delegates to transform their notes into minutes for different types of meetings. Effective Note Taking is a related, but separated course.
Date: To be confirmed
Time: To be confirmed
- PERSONAL SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
This workshop focuses on the individual and their management of their own development. It empowers the person to self-assess their competencies, qualities, well-being and aspirations. Working in a support function, at times in a reactive capacity can challenge a people’s sense of control over their work skills and development. This programme supports their control and influence over their own development and career, where possible This workshop allows delegates the time to review their own skills, competencies and qualities. It provides a framework for maximizing their potential and developing themselves.
Date: To be confirmed
Time: To be confirmed