Administrative Professionals Day is April 26, and the Community of Business is celebrating.
The San Diego Business Journal will present its Administrative Professionals of the Year for 2023 in that week’s issue, recognizing the work of these essential assistants within organizations throughout San Diego County.
This will be the first time the San Diego Business Journal has honored administrative professionals in this way.
The deadline for nominations is Wednesday, April 5.
Nomination forms are available here.
Those chosen for the honor will be presented in a special section publishing on April 24, the Monday before Administrative Professionals Day.
To qualify, nominees must have the title of executive assistant, administrative assistant or similar. Nominees must have a minimum of three years’ experience. They must live and work in San Diego County.
4,420 Professionals
Administrative Professionals Day, in some form, has been celebrated in the United States since the 1950s. It falls on the Wednesday of the last full week of April.
Today there are more than 3.4 million administrative professionals in the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The San Diego-Carlsbad region has approximately 4,420 executive administrative assistants. The mean wage is $71,780 per year. That is well below Silicon Valley, whose mean wage of $94,590 is the highest in the nation.
Typically, administrative professionals work in the shadow of an organization’s CEO, other members of the C-suite, or the people running divisions.
While they don’t really dwell in obscurity, administrative professionals definitely work in a half-light. Outside the walls of their organizations, they might be anonymous. It’s only when a newcomer gets a peek inside an organization that they realize how central an administrative professional is to an enterprise’s inner workings.
Administrative professionals are sort of like the people who vied for Best Actor or Actress in a Supporting Role during the recent Academy Awards.
Business leaders who know their right-hand person is a Jamie Lee Curtis or a Ke Huy Quan can now thank them in a new way … and bring their hard work out of obscurity.
