With today being Administrative Professionals Day, we celebrate special people who keep things running smoothly in the businesses and organizations in our community.

Administrators seem to have everything handled. They know where everything goes, and how to ensure all the details are covered. They are also quite often the first to greet patrons on the phone or in person. 

Those key players often have titles like, 'Administrative Assistant', but many organizations would struggle to keep things organized without them.

"I always like to say, they're kind of the glue that keeps everybody together, they're the ones that take the load off the rest of us, right?" expressed Sheena Onrait, Manager of Marketing and Communications with Southeast College. 

While these highly valued employees often stay in their positions long-term, they can always benefit from more learning.

"It really is very beneficial to be trained, and to continue to upgrade your skills, and continue to improve your skills. It just makes you feel that much more employable, but it makes you run all around more efficient employee as well." 

According to Onrait, in terms of demand for specific training in this area, the trends do fluctuate.

"In the past we have had a full-time Office Administration program, and that one, like everything you kind of have peaks and valleys with your programs, so that one we haven't actually done the last couple of years, but there definitely are some very administrative-focused, shorter-term courses at Southeast College."

She said one of the programs offers online management training.

"These ones are short may range from admin office procedures, to event planning, to time management skills, and they're nice little short snippets that, if someone is either working towards getting a job in administration, or maybe they're already in administration and and looking to kind of hone their skills a little bit, it's a great option for them," Onrait shared.

Southeast College's Business Management Essentials Workshops are six hours in length, and are delivered live online through the Teams technology.

"There's 10 different courses that fall under that course umbrella and, just off the top of my head, they range from communication strategies to problem solving, teamwork, team building, and you know, a whole other assortment of programs," she added.

Admin professionals may not be the only ones who need to stay on top of things in business.

"These courses are not industry-specific. They're generic enough that they cross a wide range of occupations, so they could benefit anyone from a manager, to an entrepreneur, a self employed person, an administrative person. We've had our middle level managers take them. It really does have a wide variety of audiences that the administrative courses reach."

Find more HERE.