During the job searching, one day, you will face the requirements of clerical skills, the skills aimed to improve job performance, partnership, and effectiveness in the administrative sphere. These qualities serve great, no matter what job you are looking for.
Now, we’ll discuss clerical skills in detail.
So, clerical skills mean the ability to perform regular daily work tasks aimed to improve organizational performance. Generally, these qualities include the fundamental-easy-to-learn skills, and, at the same time, they play a significant role in smooth job operation.
Among other skills and qualifications, HR managers highlight them more. So, including them in your job summary will attract their attention and increase your chance of finding a good office job.
There are several types of clerical abilities:
- Written and verbal skills of communication: On the job, you have to interact with people and solve various situations every day. That is why you need to have great verbal and written communication skills to contact colleges, administration, and clients. This group of skills includes the following abilities – self-confidence, peak listening, correct grammar and spelling, negotiation skills, social abilities, e-mail corresponding skills, etc.
- Knowing-how-to-use-computer skills: Nowadays, many employers opt for candidates with basic computer abilities. They can include anything – from knowing-how-to-use Microsoft Word or work with Excel. Don’t be afraid; there is nothing complicated. If you do not know how to work in some programs, you can look for helpful information on the Internet. This group includes such skills as working with different video platforms (like Skype or Zoom), knowing the word processors (like Google Documents or Microsoft Office), working with social media accounts, calendars, e-mail, etc.
- An eye for detail ability: Maybe, it is one of the essential clerical abilities that every employer looks for. This quality indicates your focus on the job, correctly, and high-quality performing of your duties. Besides, it helps notice the possible problems beforehand and beat them. Such qualities as sheet proof, planning in advance, critical thinking, noticing potential problems beforehand, and asking pertinent questions belong to this group.
- Organization abilities: They play a significant role in every office post (not even office). It means something more than just keeping your workplace in order or following the calendar. It implies the systematization of documents and info about private clients. To this group, such abilities as management of time, paper and schedule maintenance, appointments, and eye-for-detail ability belong.
- Simple knowledge of mathematics: Generally, you do not need to do complicated calculating on the office job, but you should be ready to do the simple one at any time. This ability helps quickly work with electronic spreadsheets and complete everyday tasks more productively. The simple-knowledge-of-mathematics ability involves working with decimals, percentages, divisions, fractions, addition, subtraction, etc.
- Critical thought ability: The employers opt for workers that can effectively face all unexpected circumstances. And here, critical thought ability helps a lot. This quality also helps judge all existing problems and meet them (plus, it dramatically affects the job’s productivity).
- Management-of-time skills: During the workday, you have to complete a lot of tasks. Here, the management of time ability greatly helps to correctly divide all duties into small tasks and complete them on time.
- Being-flexible ability: In our fast-changing world, this ability is very precious since it helps adjust to new, unexpected circumstances, remaining positive.
These are the most important clerical abilities all workers should have. The additional clerical skills include interpersonal abilities, servicing, multitasking, conflict solution, and others.
The clerical abilities have one great advantage – you practice them every day on the job. But the additional practice has never bothered anyone. So, we’ll recommend some extra ways to improve your clerical abilities – looking for a coach, watching how others do their job (they can also give some helpful tips on how to perform their duties effectively), online and offline studies, and feedback asking.
Do you need to include the clerical skills in your summary? Of course, you should do it! You should mention them in the section of professional abilities or in the part where you describe your job experience. When describing clerical skills, we advise being more concrete (for example, if you have working skills in some program, you should mention them). Describe them in the way to make the employer hire you!
