Office changes spell end for executive assistants

Executive assistants once ran the office. Increasingly, the office runs without them.

Technology and automation have chipped away at duties like papers to be filed and landlines to be answered.

Executive assistants once ran the office. Increasingly, the office runs without them.

The decline of what has been a solid career path for women without college degrees has been quiet and gradual, but in magnitude it has mirrored the downturn in blue-collar factory work, economists say.

Technology and automation have chipped away at duties like papers to be filed and landlines to be answered. A new generation of corporate leaders are content to schedule meetings and book flights on their own. Glad to cut costs, companies have culled their administrative ranks, transformed the role for many of those who have managed to hang on and moved some positions to cheaper parts of the country.

More than 1.6 million secretarial and administrative-­assistant jobs have vanished since 2000, according to federal data, a decline of almost 40 per cent, comparable to that in manufacturing. The losses haven’t garnered much notice. Unlike a plant closing that leaves thousands of Americans unemployed in one go, jobs in a traditionally female sector have evaporated in dribs and drabs.

At the pinnacle of the sector were the executive assistants, a 95 per cent female workforce, ­according to labour-market research firm Emsi, that could make as much as six figures.

When Jessica Schiffman, 42, left her executive-assistant job at the National Hockey League in 2015 to help care for a sick family member, she assumed it would be no problem to find work again.

Change in US employment since 2000

She landed a job the following year at Anheuser-Busch, but was shocked by the open office and lack of desk phones and filing cabinets. There were few assistants, and the gig only lasted four months. Ms Schiffman was laid off again from a subsequent job and has spent most of the past two years searching for work that will last. “I want to find a place where I don’t have to look for another job in another two years,” she says.

“You don’t have enough time to make those close relationships with people.”

An Anheuser-Busch spokesman says that, of the 3500 ­employees in Anheuser-Busch InBev’s North America division, only about 30 or 40 top managers had dedicated executive assistants.

Many of the women whose ­positions vanished are now in their 50s and 60s and some are finding that the only jobs they can get are low-paying and often physically demanding, such as stocking shelves or ferrying ride-hail passengers. The workers taking their place are often younger with college degrees; some make half as much money while supporting more executives.

That’s the model at Ernst & Young.

The US affiliate of the big accounting and consulting firm has hired 460 remote executive assistants in five low-cost cities, including Tucson, Arizona, and Louisville, Kentucky, who support executives in places such as Manhattan and Los Angeles. Many of the traditional executive assistants are gone.

Ernst & Young piloted the remote program in 2014 after realising that partners were increasingly away from the offices where their assistants sat, says Megan Hobson, an Ernst & Young partner who oversees administrative operations. “If somebody’s not in our office, yet we have somebody commuting into the office to be their assistant, where’s the disconnect?” she says.

She says the company is now hiring the bulk of its executive ­assistants in the remote centres.

There is no around-the-clock administrative support for partners and directors, says Ms Hobson. If somebody has a cancelled flight, they call travel services themselves. They’re told to keep their personal lives separate, she says — no one is picking up their dry-cleaning.

The number of executive assistant jobs fell 23 per cent over the past five years, according to Emsi. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics projects those jobs — which numbered 622,500 in 2018 — will drop another 20 per cent to below 500,000 by 2028.

Up to 10 million women across six mature economies, including the US and Canada, will need to switch roles or careers by 2030 as their office-support jobs disappear, according to McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm.