Working as a Personal Assistant

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I am currently doing a course to become a personal assisstant. i seem to highly excel in the course and I am leagues ahead of even the teacher in my knowledge on all the topics. I will have no issue getting a job based on my skills but I am worried about the social componants of the job. Basically I will be looking after all the needs of my boss, being a secretary as well as organising his/ her private life including all travel and family arrangements.

Are there any other autistic people that do this kind of work? I would love some kind of feed back even from receptionists and secretaries which I will have to liase with.

I worked as Executive Secretary for several years. I am NT. It is a very demanding job. You will have to be able to handle lots of stress, should be highly organized, and good in interpersonal relationships. I am not sure if this is a good field of work for an Aspie. When I asked this about my daughter I was told she would function better working on a field that required a methodology, like programming, engineering, sciences, a field with a set of rules that needs to be followed. What you are persuing is not methodic. You need to provise a lot. I think you should ask your teacher about this.

I have talked to the teacher about this. She said a lot of my skills make the job perfect for me like my ability to multitask and memorise facts first time. My mind works faster then most people and I see things that others don't so eg In the class about taking notes in meetings, I not only got down full diction from each person in the room but also occupations and experience. When organising an interstate trip and hotel stays, I was the first to point out even to the tacher that the hotel most of the class chose wasn't appropriate due to the lack of multimedia equipment and lack of adjoining rooms in the hotel. I chose to do this course so I can get a job in data entry but my prior skills were too high to get into the simple admin course and they wouldn't take me. Hopefully I will get a job in academia as a pa to a professor. I must also say that I have completed this 6 month long course in 4 to 5 weeks.

I also thrive on structure and i need strict deadlines. I need to be told what to do and I am happy to do it, and as promptly as possible. my failure at university comes from the fact I need strict scheduals and deadlines and to be bossed around. I am hyper organised and feel the need for strict order.

OMG. Please, please don't do this if you have the option to do something else.

Being a PA is something I fell into. I learned to type at school because I had some romantic idea about writing a book someday and I thought it would be a useful skill. The thing is, when I left school, you can imagine what ideas the jobcentre had when they saw I could type and use a computer.

I was pushed into office work, and of course, once you've got that on your CV, other employers are only going to offer you the type of work for which you already have experience.

I've tried all sorts of things to escape from office support roles entirely - retraining, volunteering - but recruiters don't care about that, they're only interested in offering you something that is sufficiently similar (for their purposes) to your existing work history.

The other thing you'll find when applying for secretarial/PA jobs is that so long as your skills meet a certain minimum level of expectations, recruiters will only pay lip service to those at interview. Temple Grandin says sell your skills rather than yourself, but recruiters looking for support staff won't be interested in seeing a portfolio or anything like that. You'll be expected to sell yourself and your personality before you'll ever get a chance to sell your skills and knowledge. Unless you're very confident at doing that, I really don't recommend this line of work at all.

PA to a professor is a very different scenario. Not that much pressure, and a more closed environment. One of my works as secretary for PA for the head of the master's department. It was fairly easy, because most of my job was to organize the courses and the payroll for the professors, and I had very little interaction with other people besides students and teachers. It was pretty nice. I hope you the best!! !