Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as an office support specialist and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
An Office Support Specialist is liable to fulfill a variety of roles including handling the company's paperwork and day to day operations.
The major roles for this position include ordering the office supplies, ensuring that the office equipment is fully functional, ensuring that the office supplies are well stocked as required, gathering and distributing mail, coordinating deliveries, providing general support to the management, filing and compiling the company's documentation, answering phones and taking messages, operating office machines, ,maintaining and updating filing, inventory, mailing and database systems, opening, sorting and routing incoming mail, answering correspondence and preparing outgoing mail, completing mail bills, contracts, policies, invoices and checks.
Core Skills Required to be an Office Support Specialist
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
An office support specialist should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Critical Thinking:
Critical Thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally while understanding the logical connection between ideas in a reflective and independent thinking.
An Office Support Specialist will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments and findings do represent the entire picture while identifying, analyzing and solving problems by deducing consequences from what he knows and making use of the information gathered.
Administrative Skills:
Administrative Skills are all the services related to the running of a business or keeping an office organized while supporting the efforts of the management team.
An Office Support Specialist must develop these skills and emphasize the administrative skills to ensure high-level responsibilities that range from planning large scale events to creating presentations and analyzing financial data are handled carefully and efficiently.
Collaborating with others:
Collaborating is willingly working with one another and cooperating in whatever task one is assigned without behaving poorly or having an attitude change that hurts others.
An Office Support Specialist is meant to collaborate with all workers and management both male and female without causing frustrations or sidelining any worker or delaying their promotion from any informal conversations where most decisions are often made.
Supervisory Skills:
Supervisory Skills is the ability to lead and manage people effectively in a difficult and challenging atmosphere in the day to day life.
An Office Support Specialist must cultivate, develop and refine management and supervisory skills to strengthen the present as well as build the future of the business by becoming competent in such roles like problem-solving, communication, managing people, time management, leadership, planning, etc.
Adaptability:
Adaptability is the ability to cope with and adapt to unexpected situations in any environment and staying connected with a great attitude.
An Office Support Specialist must shape the workplace with leadership skills that allow employees to adapt to the provided atmosphere and be able to give their best in the workplace while growing in their ability to become the best employees.
Handling Stress:
Handling Stress is the skill to balance the requirements of the job and your abilities or available resources in performing it.
An Office Support Specialist needs to creatively learn how to schedule work according to the abilities of different individuals to ensure a balance that will not put an unsustainable level of pressure on the employees and cause them to accumulate work related stress.
Self-Discipline and Sense of Duty:
Self-Discipline and Sense of Duty is an active effort which helps in developing set ways for your thoughts, actions, and habits empowering your to stick to your decisions.
An Office Support Specialist needs to learn the secret of fostering the development of self-discipline amongst the employees by clearly defining the expectations, staying in sync with the work related events and propagate result yielding ideas that employees suggest.
Diversity Awareness:
Diversity Awareness is the understanding that people are different and unique in their particular way and respecting their uniqueness.
An Office Support Specialist ought to successfully identify the various types of diversity presented in his company to be able to benefit from these individual differences in the hope of improving the success of his team and encourage the team members to become aware of these qualities and use them appropriately.
Scheduling:
Scheduling is creating daily workflow charts that the employees are supposed to follow when working and submitting their projects.
An Office Support Specialist must be dedicated to establishing and maintaining the schedule using either manual or technology methods to ensure it is always updated according to the tasks, the employees responsible or the time allocated to each task without fail or delay.
Computer Skills:
Computer Skills are the necessary computer working skills that each employee need to have while seeking to get admitted into the professional world.
An Office Support Specialist ought to be technologically oriented and hire employees with strong computer skills because they fare better in the job market than their tech-challenged counterparts bringing a high level of quality employees in the job seeking category.
Hard Skills Required to be an Office Support Specialist
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
An office support specialist should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.