Advanced Office Administration and Executive Support Training Course

Course overview

Senior administrators and executive assistants are often responsible for far more than calendars and correspondence. They protect executive time, coordinate decisions across competing priorities, prepare leaders for high-stakes meetings, manage confidential information, and keep complex office operations moving when plans change. This course addresses the gap between competent administrative delivery and strategic executive support: the ability to anticipate requirements, establish reliable systems, influence stakeholders appropriately, and provide concise information that enables faster decisions.

Participants build advanced methods for executive diary management, meeting governance, briefing preparation, action tracking, travel and event coordination, records control, and office workflow improvement. They learn to use priority matrices, stakeholder maps, RACI responsibility charts, decision logs, briefing-note structures, escalation protocols, and service-level measures. Practical sessions also strengthen professional judgement in handling confidential material, difficult requests, conflicting deadlines, and communications on behalf of senior leaders.

The programme is delivered through instructor-led demonstrations, realistic executive-office case studies, peer reviews, and applied workshops using Microsoft 365 tools. Participants work with a simulated executive portfolio involving diary conflicts, a board meeting, an urgent stakeholder issue, and a cross-functional project. They leave with an Executive Support Operating Toolkit: a set of reusable templates for weekly executive planning, meeting briefs, action registers, stakeholder communications, delegation follow-up, and office process improvement.

It is designed for experienced office administrators, executive assistants, personal assistants, office managers, and senior coordinators who already manage core administrative tasks and need to operate with greater autonomy, structure, and influence.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Design an executive weekly-planning system using priority criteria, protected focus time, travel buffers, and diary decision rules
• Produce concise executive briefing packs containing decision context, stakeholder positions, risks, recommendations, and required actions
• Apply a RACI matrix and action register to clarify ownership and follow up cross-functional commitments
• Manage complex meeting governance through agendas, pre-reads, decision logs, minutes, and post-meeting action controls
• Use stakeholder mapping and communication protocols to handle competing requests and escalate issues appropriately
• Create a confidential-information handling workflow covering access permissions, document version control, retention, and secure sharing
• Analyse office workflows with process maps and service measures to identify bottlenecks, hand-off failures, and improvement actions
• Build an Executive Support Operating Toolkit of reusable templates for diary planning, briefing, delegation tracking, and office reporting

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Executive Assistants — who support senior leaders with complex diaries, briefing requirements, and confidential stakeholder communication
• Personal Assistants — who need stronger systems for prioritising executive requests and managing delegated follow-up
• Senior Office Administrators — who coordinate office services, meetings, records, and multi-team administrative workflows
• Office Managers — who need to standardise administrative processes and improve service reliability across the office
• Chief of Staff Support Officers — who prepare decision material and track strategic actions for leadership teams
• Project Coordinators — who provide governance, meeting, and action-management support to senior sponsors

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have practical experience in an administrative, PA, executive assistant, office management, or coordination role and be comfortable managing calendars, meetings, email, documents, and routine stakeholder communication. The course assumes working familiarity with Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, and SharePoint or equivalent workplace tools. Participants should understand basic meeting minutes, confidentiality expectations, and common office filing practices. No formal management qualification, project-management certification, advanced Excel modelling, or prior exposure to RACI, process mapping, or stakeholder-analysis frameworks is required.

Training methodology

The instructor uses executive-office scenarios rather than abstract administration examples. Short teaching segments introduce tools such as the priority matrix, RACI chart, stakeholder map, process map, and decision log; participants then apply them to diary conflicts, board-meeting preparation, confidential correspondence, and action follow-up. Individual drafting work is reviewed against practical quality criteria, while small groups compare escalation choices and communication approaches. Each participant completes an end-of-course application plan that identifies one executive-support process to implement, measures to track, and stakeholders to involve.

Course outline

Day 1: Strategic Executive Support and Priority Control

• The executive assistant as gatekeeper, adviser, coordinator, and operational risk controller
• Executive priority matrices for assessing value, urgency, authority, and stakeholder impact
• Diary architecture using protected time, decision windows, travel buffers, and preparation blocks
• Request triage rules for meetings, email, calls, delegated work, and competing commitments
• Stakeholder mapping by influence, urgency, relationship sensitivity, and decision dependency
• Boundary-setting language and escalation protocols for difficult or inappropriate requests
• Weekly executive planning routines and forward-look reviews

Workshop: Participants rebuild a conflicted executive diary and produce a one-week planning schedule with triage decisions, stakeholder responses, and escalation notes.

Day 2: Meeting Governance, Briefing and Decision Support

• Meeting purpose tests and agenda design for decision, review, and information sessions
• Pre-read management including deadlines, version control, circulation lists, and late-paper handling
• Executive briefing-note structure: context, issue, options, recommendation, and decision required
• Board and leadership meeting pack assembly and quality-assurance checks
• Decision logs, action registers, and owner-due-date tracking methods
• Minute-writing techniques that distinguish discussion, decisions, risks, and commitments
• Post-meeting follow-up communications and action escalation

Workshop: Participants prepare a briefing pack, agenda, decision log, and action register for a simulated leadership meeting.

Day 3: Communication, Influence and Confidentiality

• Writing on behalf of executives: tone, authority, audience, and approval boundaries
• Email protocols for concise requests, clear decisions, and accountable follow-up
• Difficult stakeholder conversations involving declined requests, changed priorities, and delayed responses
• Delegation follow-up without overstepping authority or damaging working relationships
• Confidentiality classifications, need-to-know access, and secure information-sharing practices
• Document naming conventions, version control, and controlled distribution in SharePoint
• Records retention and disposal principles aligned to ISO 15489

Workshop: Participants draft and peer-review executive correspondence and a confidential document-control protocol for a sensitive leadership issue.

Day 4: Office Operations and Workflow Improvement

• Office service maps covering requests, approvals, hand-offs, records, and customer touchpoints
• SIPOC and swimlane process mapping for administrative workflows
• Root-cause analysis using the five whys and cause-and-effect categories
• Service-level measures for response times, meeting readiness, action closure, and document retrieval
• RACI matrices for office services, events, procurement requests, and executive support tasks
• Risk registers for travel, events, suppliers, confidential information, and business continuity
• Standard operating procedures and quality-control checklists

Workshop: Participants map an approval or meeting-preparation process, diagnose a bottleneck, and produce a RACI-based improvement proposal.

Day 5: Integrated Executive Office Simulation and Application

• Managing an executive-office scenario with simultaneous diary, travel, meeting, and stakeholder demands
• Microsoft Outlook categories, rules, shared calendars, and delegate-access practices
• Microsoft Teams channels, meeting artefacts, task follow-up, and communication boundaries
• Microsoft Excel action trackers, deadline flags, status reporting, and simple dashboard measures
• SharePoint document libraries, permissions, version history, and controlled templates
• Executive support reporting: weekly highlights, risks, decisions required, and forward commitments
• Ninety-day implementation planning and stakeholder adoption strategy

Workshop: Participants complete an integrated executive-support simulation and finalise their Executive Support Operating Toolkit and 90-day implementation plan.

Tools & standards covered

Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft SharePoint

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions