Personal Assistant Resume: Example and Tips

Personal assistants provide administrative support to senior staff, generally on a one-to-one basis. Personal assistants play a vital role in time management, scheduling meetings and organizing events. The position also has the potential for excellent career growth, where you can progress to executive assistant or company secretary.

Our tips and resume examples will help you compose a perfect resume, enabling you to stand out from the crowd of applicants.

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Personal Assistant Combination Resume Example

Top 4 Characteristics of a Best-in-Class Personal Assistant Resume

  1. Summary Feature your best professional achievement in this section, such as reducing delivery time to customers and improving efficiency by devising innovative methods. You can also mention job-related certifications you’ve earned, which adds more value to your resume.
  2. Skills More organizations are using applicant tracking systems (ATS) to filter resumes. In such a competitive world, make sure you showcase your best skills, based on the job posting, such as “qualified CAP professional”). You can also include different languages that you are fluent in, or additional industry-specific training you have.
  3. Work history Describe your professional experience and focus on your success in previous roles. Highlight projects where you took on additional responsibilities rather than routine tasks. When highlighting achievements, use statistics to demonstrate your success. For example: “Initiated interdepartmental training program that resulted in 25% increase in productivity.”
  4. Education In additional to any college or vocational degrees, list courses that show you’ve broadened your skills and knowledge, including:
    • Business and managerial economics
    • Business administration
    • Secretarial and personal assistant certification
    • Administrative secretarial certification
    • Office management

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Find the Right Template for your Resume

Stay focused on highlighting your skills, achievements, qualifications and experience while leaving your resume formatting worries with us, using these professionally-designed templates and our resume builder:

Contempo

In this innovative and sleek design, bold highlighted text is used to draw attention to your experience and make your resume stand out.

Deluxe

Simple borders, capitalized headers and subtle use of colors give this resume a distinctive look.

Refined

This elegant design utilizes centered headlines and professional font, and is suitable for job seekers in almost all sectors

To see more design templates and create an eye-catching resume, visit our resume templates page.

Do’s and Don’ts for Your Resume

  • Do quantify your work Describe your achievements in numbers. For example: “Managed a team of six assistants in two departments” or “Organized events for the company for sales executives across five cities.” Doing so will provide the recruiter a clearer picture of your capabilities, and insight into your overall approach.
  • Do include keywords from the job description Synchronize your resume to reflect the job description by reflecting the keywords there that align with your own experience. Recruiters may use scanning programs to find out how compatible your resume is with their requirements, and they may catch you if you simply copy and paste whole phrases from the job description into your resume. Instead, sprinkle keywords that match your skills into your experience, summary statement and skills sections, and give examples of how you’ve actually used these skills.
  • Do keep your resume concise Conventional wisdom says that one page is usually enough to present all of your important information in a resume. This is especially true for first-time job seekers, or those without much experience. For jobs that require more experience, it’s generally OK to extend your resume to two pages, but in all cases, make sure you use concise phrases in your summary and work history, and only include information that directly addresses the potential job’s requirements.
  • Don’t use fancy colors or pictures Only fashion or graphic designing industries encourage resumes with fancy designs and unusual resume fonts. Elsewhere, stick with a simple, straightforward template. Using distracting fonts and colors will take away attention from the actual content of the resume.
  • Don’t be inconsistent Inconsistency in grammar, date formats, use of bullet points or overall layout will send recruiters the wrong message about your skills and attention to detail. Make sure that your resume is properly formatted and proofed for any typos or grammatical errors.
  • Don’t use passive voice or write in the first person One common factor among all resumes is not using first-person (“I” or “me”) or passive voice (e.g., “was responsible for event planning”). Instead use straightforward phrases, leading with powerful action verbs (e.g., deployed, mentored or facilitated). This energizes the presentation of your work achievements, while keeping everything concise.