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Administration and Management
"Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise."
(Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management)
 Administration and business is a wide ranging career area, covering many varied and interesting jobs.
'Office work' covers:
- clerical and secretarial jobs
- public service jobs
- the support and administrative staff working behind the scenes.
Supervisors, team leaders and managers take charge of:
- central government (the Civil Service)
- local government (local authorities or councils)
- public bodies (the Health Service)
- Parliament (researchers and politicians)
- businesses that used to be publicly owned (the Post Office).
They have specialist advisers, such as economists.
The jobs and courses for this career area are in 6 sectors:
- General management and administration
- Economics
- Human resource management
- Management services
- Public services administration
- Quality management.
Job prospects in this career area are generally good. In Scotland the numbers employed in public administration (including defence) are expected to rise to 149,000 in 2014.
The general management and administrative sector is also healthy. On a UK basis 23.5% of business and management students who graduated in 2008 went into management positions.
Entry to personnel and human resource development jobs is very competitive. It helps if you have qualifications and experience in the field.
Economics graduates may find good jobs in business and finance. Business and management graduates have an unemployment rate of 8.9% and find jobs in many different sectors.
For most jobs in this career area you should be good at:
- communicating – on the phone, face-to-face and in writing
- dealing with people
- handling information (computer skills are important)
- organising (yourself and others)
- being patient
- handling stress
- getting things done
- deciding priorities
- negotiating (with workers and the public)
- taking decisions
- taking responsibility (even if you are not in a supervisory post).
In a management job you’ll need these skills at a higher level than you will as an administrative assistant.
There are lots of ways into these jobs. You can enter some of them straight from school with few qualifications. For others you need a higher education qualification, such as a Higher National Certificate (HNC), Higher National Diploma (HND) or degree.
Sources
Occupational Profile (Scotland) – Administrative and Secretarial Occupations – Futureskills Scotland, and Sector Profile: Public Administration – Futureskills Scotland (http://www.futureskillsscotland.org.uk/)
What do graduates do? published in November 2009 by HECSU/AGCAS in association with UCAS.
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