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Administrative Assistant Resume Example

Administrative work is easy to do well and hard to write down, because most of it is invisible when it goes right. This example shows how to convert a duty list into scope: who you supported, how many diaries you ran, what you were trusted to handle without asking.

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Sample administrative assistant resume

The same resume in the Modern, Executive and Elegant templates. Switch between them to see how the layout changes, then copy the structure into your own.

Minimal and left aligned, with thin rules and a near black accent.

Alex Morgan

Administrative Assistant, Executive and Team Support

alex.morgan@example.com
(555) 555-0100
Austin, TX
linkedin.com/in/alex-morgan-example

Summary

Administrative assistant with 5 years supporting senior leaders and their teams in a 200-person organisation. Runs three executive diaries across European and US time zones, owns travel and expenses end to end, and prepares the papers for a monthly leadership meeting. Trusted with compensation, legal and personnel material, and used to being the person who notices the clash before it happens.

Skills

Calendar management across multiple time zones
Travel booking, itineraries and visa coordination
Expense processing (Concur, Expensify)
Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Teams)
Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs)
Meeting minutes and action tracking
Document and records management
Purchase orders, invoices and supplier onboarding
Event, offsite and board meeting coordination
DocuSign and contract circulation
Confidential file handling
Front-of-house and visitor management

Experience

Administrative Assistant

Northwind Labs, 2022 to Present

Managed the calendars of 3 directors across 2 time zones, coordinating roughly 60 meetings a week including external client and board scheduling.
Owned end-to-end travel for a 24-person department, booking international itineraries and reconciling the expense claims that followed in Concur.
Prepared and circulated papers for a monthly leadership meeting, tracking 30 or more open actions between sessions and chasing owners before the deadline rather than after it.

Associate Administrative Assistant

Brightline Group, 2019 to 2022

Rebuilt the department's shared filing structure in SharePoint and wrote the naming convention that went with it, ending a recurring pattern of duplicate contract versions.
Coordinated a 120-attendee annual offsite, from venue and catering contracts through to the running order and on-the-day logistics, delivered within the agreed budget.
Onboarded 18 new starters, arranging equipment, system access and first-week schedules so each began with a full calendar rather than an empty one.

Education

Bachelor of Science

Riverton University, 2015 to 2019

Sample content. Alex Morgan, the employers and the school shown above are fictional, and the contact details are reserved placeholders.

How to write a administrative assistant resume

Scope in this role means who you supported. Number of executives, their seniority, and the size of the team behind them. A resume that never states this reads identically to every other one in the pile.

Never write 'Microsoft Office'. Write the applications and the level: 'Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP, formatted reporting)', 'Outlook (delegate access, shared mailboxes)'. Postings screen on the application names.

Proofread this resume harder than any other. The output of the job is documents, so a typo is not a small blemish here, it is a work sample.

Say what you handled without supervision. Booking approval, expense authority, access to confidential material. Trust is the thing being hired and the thing most resumes forget to mention.

Why administrative assistant applications get screened out

These are the failures specific to this role: the ones a generic CV guide will not warn you about.

Software listed as 'Microsoft Office' or 'computer literate' rather than the named applications, which is the exact string the filter looks for.
No indication of who was supported, so the screener cannot separate reception cover from executive support.
Bullets copied from a job description ('answered phones, filed documents, greeted visitors') with nothing owned and nothing decided.
Typos or inconsistent formatting, which are disqualifying in a role whose deliverable is correctly formatted documents.
No mention of discretion or confidential material in a role that routinely sees salaries, legal files and personnel cases.
Calendar and travel work described with no scale: no diary count, no time zones, no meeting or trip volume.

What drives pay for this role

The main lever is who you support. Team administration sits below support for a department head, which sits below executive or board-level support, and the gap between those bands is larger than the gap between years of experience. Beyond that: industry (legal, financial services and technology generally price above non-profit and education), whether you hold budget, expense approval or line-management responsibility, specialist system knowledge such as legal e-filing or clinical scheduling, city and commuting requirement, and whether the position is permanent or filled through a temp agency, which changes both the rate and the stability.

Administrative Assistant resume questions

Administrative assistant or executive assistant, which should I apply for?: The dividing line is usually autonomy rather than tasks. If you have made decisions on someone's behalf, guarded their time against competing demands, and been trusted with confidential material, you are describing executive assistant work and should frame it that way. If the work has been team-wide support and coordination, apply as an administrative assistant and let the EA framing come with the next step.
How do I quantify administrative work?: Count the things the job actually contains: diaries managed, meetings coordinated per week, trips booked per quarter, expense claims processed, people onboarded, events run and their attendance. None of it is sensitive and all of it turns an invisible job into a measurable one.
Do I need to list a typing speed?: Only where the posting asks, which now tends to mean minute-taking, transcription or legal support roles. Elsewhere it reads as filler and takes a line that a named system would use better.
How do I handle a history of short temp contracts?: Group them. A single heading such as 'Temporary assignments via [agency], 2023 to 2025' followed by the organisations and what each placement covered reads as a deliberate route rather than a series of exits. Temp work is normal in administration and screeners know it, but a page of three-month entries with no framing invites the wrong question.

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