Administrative Assistant Resume Example
A full resume for an administrative assistant, annotated around the hardest thing about writing one.
Here is the difficulty nobody names. Administrative work is judged by absence. The meeting had a room. The invoice was approved before the deadline. The visitor was expected. Nobody noticed any of it, because noticing only happens when it fails.
That makes this the hardest common role to write a resume for, and it is not because the work is simple. It is because the evidence is invisible by design.
The resume
Priya Raman Manchester, UK · priya.raman@example.com · 07700 900412
Summary
Administrative assistant supporting a 40-person engineering office, running scheduling for six managers, supplier invoicing up to £180,000 a year, and the office move completed in 2025. Point of contact for facilities, IT onboarding and travel.
Experience
Office Administrator — Calderfield Engineering, Manchester April 2022 – present
- Run diaries for six managers across three time zones, including the weekly programme review that pulls in twenty-two people.
- Process supplier invoices through Sage, around £180,000 a year, and chase approvals; moved the approval backlog from an average of eleven days to four by agreeing a standing Thursday sign-off slot with the finance lead.
- Rebuilt the new-starter onboarding checklist after two hires arrived with no laptop; the checklist now starts fourteen days out and has not missed since.
- Coordinated the move to the Ancoats office over a weekend — 40 desks, phones and network — with the team working normally on Monday morning.
- First point of contact for facilities, IT and travel, which in practice means deciding what to solve and what to escalate.
Receptionist — Northgate Business Centre, Manchester June 2020 – March 2022
- Front desk for a serviced building with eleven tenant companies and their visitors.
- Took over meeting-room bookings when double-bookings were a weekly complaint, and moved the building onto a single shared calendar.
Education
A-Levels — Whitworth Sixth Form College, Manchester, 2020
Skills
Microsoft 365 · Sage · Diary management for multiple stakeholders · Supplier invoicing · Travel booking · Minute-taking
Why it is written this way
Scope is the number that always exists
You may have no revenue figure and no conversion rate. You always have scope: how many people, how many diaries, how much money passing through your hands, how many sites.
Forty people. Six managers. Twenty-two attendees. £180,000. Forty desks. None of those required a reporting tool to find — they are just the size of the job, stated. A reader who has never met you now knows whether your experience is the size of theirs, which is the actual question behind the screen.
The strongest lines are the ones where something used to break
Read the invoice bullet and the onboarding bullet again. Both have the same shape:
this used to go wrong → I changed the arrangement → it stopped
That shape is the answer to the invisibility problem. You cannot evidence the meetings that went fine, but you can evidence the thing that was failing before you fixed it — because the failure was visible, and its absence afterwards is attributable to you.
Most administrative resumes contain none of these, not because the person never fixed anything, but because fixing things quietly is the job and it never occurs to them that it counts. It counts more than anything else on the page. If you can only remember one, put it first.
“Supported” is the weakest verb available
“Supported the engineering team” tells a reader nothing about what you did, and it is the default phrasing on nearly every resume for this role — which means it also fails to distinguish you from any of them.
Every bullet here replaces it with the specific action: run, process, rebuilt, coordinated. The last one goes furthest and says the quiet part — deciding what to solve and what to escalate. That judgement is the difference between an assistant who needs managing and one who removes management work, and it is worth stating plainly because nobody ever does.
The skills list is short on purpose
Six entries, all either a named system or a real task. “Organised”, “team player” and “attention to detail” are absent — every applicant claims them, so they distinguish nobody, and they dilute the entries that do.
Note that Sage is named. A named system is one of the few things on an administrative resume that can be matched exactly by a screening filter, which is reason enough to write it rather than “accounting software”.
On the parts not explained here
How to phrase a bullet as an outcome, and which lines to delete from an old resume, are set out in the customer service resume example. Why this one is single-column with no icons is in how to check if your resume is ATS-friendly. Both apply here without change, and repeating them would only make this page longer.
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