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Who Takes Shorthand? Not Today's Secretary!
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- The secretary is not extinct, or even an endangered species. Far from it. What’s expected of her, however, has changed considerably and so have the skills she needs -- those skills even more so.
She is more likely to be called an administrative assistant or administrative professional than a secretary. The need for secretaries, especially legal and medical secretaries, though, remains as strong as ever.
The need for the same number of secretaries, to wit, those who can answer a telephone, take shorthand, type and file, has diminished.
The last known instance of someone in Youngstown taking shorthand occurred last spring. Six months ago Marilyn Waddell, executive assistant to the president of St. Elizabeth Health Center, saw an extra laptop and used it to take notes for the minutes of a board meeting, she says, and hasn’t taken shorthand since.
Before that, Waddell took shorthand of the weekly board meetings, about 80 words a minute, she recalls, but reached 120 words a minute in college.
While the title secretary remains -- if only because union contract language specifies the individuals affected be called secretaries – the duties and responsibilities have greatly expanded.
The Boardman Local School District’s contract with OAPSE, for example, still identifies those who support the principals and superintendents “secretaries,” says Timothy Saxton, director of operations, even though their responsibilities increasingly involve administration.
The introduction of the personal computer, access to the Internet and availability of software spreadsheets has made it possible for secretaries to do much more in far less time. “I’m doing three people’s [old] jobs,” says Christine Simone, office manager at Melmor Associates Inc., Niles.
“I began as a secretary and I still consider myself a secretary,” she says.
Simone started out as a secretary in 1985. The courses she’s taken since and two professional certificates she holds reflect the evolution of secretary to administrative assistant. She is a CAP – certified administrative professional (formerly CPS or certified professional secretary) –- and a CAP-OM, CAP in organizational management. To remain a CAP, she must be recertified every five years by the International Association of Administrative Professionals. “I’ve done it twice,” she says.
Yo-Mah-O is the IAAP chapter in the Mahoning Valley.
Along the way, Simone has completed 96 hours at Youngstown State University and earned continuing education credits by attending the workshops and seminars Yo-Mah-O sponsors to keep its members up-to-date.
“Our workshops are well-attended and hands-on,” she relates.
The topics run the gamut from Word to Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software to PowerPoint to teambuilding to customer service.
Those learning to be secretaries or administrative assistants still tend to be women.
At Trumbull Business College, “The majority are female,” says campus administrator Kim Straniak, but the number of male students is increasing, she says, by about 25% a year.
Trumbull Business College continues to graduate legal, executive and medical secretaries, Straniak says, but the students major in human resources, legal studies and social media. Most who earn an associate’s degree in applied business are hired as administrative assistants, not secretaries, she says. Trumbull Business last offered shorthand a dozen years ago.
Employers want to hire people who are computer-literate and familiar with the Internet. “So much [medical secretary] work is done on a computer,” Straniak says. “Transcribing, billing and coding. It’s all done through the Internet.”
Typing/keyboarding is still offered in schools but not to the extent it once was and mastery has fallen from proficient to enough to get by. This results in Trumbull Business faculty standing before first-year students whose typing skills range from minimal to proficient and almost everyone is adept at using two thumbs to text messages on smartphones or tablets.
Boardman schools’ Saxton says keyboarding has moved from high school to middle school classes, a reflection of how much earlier children are taking to computers.
By the time they graduate from Trumbull Business College, legal secretaries should have attained 55 typewriter words a minute, Straniak says, “but most are much higher. And they are accurate.”
Students become proficient in the Microsoft suite of office programs, the campus administrator says. Seldom will they be asked to produce hard copies of what they prepare but that aspect is not overlooked.
Students enter with varying degrees on proficiency on computers. What students lack, all too often, are “soft skills,” that is, adopting a professional demeanor, the ability to communicate in a professional manner and how to handle stress.
“We offer a freshman seminar on soft skills,” Straniak says. “The workplace has changed, but not as much as some seem to think.”
YSU founded its business school in 1930, and on Sept. 1, 1935, its secretarial studies program, a division of that school, opened, says assistant archivist Lisa Garufali.
In the curriculum of the program were typewriting for beginners, shorthand for beginners, secretarial accounting (basically bookkeeping), and office machines, such as using adding machines and primitive copiers. Second-year classes included shorthand dictation, production (advanced) typewriting, business law and business communications.
YSU catalogs show that shorthand was offered as late as 1994.
Once computer courses were offered at YSU, secretarial students learned word processing and typewriting became keyboarding.
Traditional secretarial skills, typing and filing especially, have been rendered redundant by so many professionals and executives possessing those skills themselves, says the dean of the William College of Business Administration at YSU, Betty Jo Licata. Most in business are familiar if not proficient with word processing and desktop publishing, using email and knowing spreadsheets.
Many students have learned on their own, Licata reports, and “professionals [business executives and owners] are doing more clerical work” rather than hand it off. In her college, most professors (especially in accounting) want their students to submit their work electronically, not as hard copy, and communications between faculty and students are often conducted by email.
It’s a rare faculty member who doesn’t type and they prepare and distribute their exams without the need for student secretaries.
While most business students have learned to communicate electronically, Licata says, “They may be good at texting but that doesn’t necessarily translate into good business communication skills.” So the time they spend in the Williamson College consists of improving their keyboarding, grammar, spelling and soft skills as well as learning computer programs, including Adobe in the marketing department.
At Roth, Blair, Roberts, Strasfeld & Lodge LPA, Youngstown, Cheryl Day is the veteran secretary of the managing partner, James E. “Ted” Roberts. Roberts uses a tape recorder to dictate his correspondence, pleadings and other work rather than keyboard himself, finding that to be a more efficient use of his and Day’s time, he says.
His father, Roberts recalls, dictated to his secretary, who took it down in shorthand. “All secretaries took shorthand,” says Roberts remembering his boyhood and visiting his father’s office. “My dad didn’t type,” his son says, and it was a rare lawyer who did, even if he could.
Day worked 19 years for attorney John Mock, she says. Mock couldn’t type and dictated to her.
Day had learned to type on a manual typewriter in high school where she also learned how to
run office machines. After graduation she attended an IBM school where she learned to use an electric typewriter but mastered word processing on her own.
Day also attended Banks Legal Clinic five years while keeping the books and tending to the correspondence of her husband’s business. A neighbor, Janet Vacaro, taught at Banks and Day remembers, “My teacher was tough.” The legal clinic helped students improve their typing skills, keep books and prepare payroll, schedule clients and prepare wills and other basic legal documents.
This prepared her to work for Mock whose practice consisted mostly of probate work. “I loved the work,” Day says, and upon his retirement went to work for Rick Blair at Roth Blair.
Key to the smooth relationship between a legal secretary and the lawyers she works for, Day says, are the secretary’s knowledge of legal terms, knowing how to spell, mastery of grammar and proofreading. The last consists of reading a document aloud to another secretary to ensure any mistakes are caught.
“We may go over a number of revisions,” Roberts says, before he’s satisfied. “I’m used to dictating,” a talent that takes some time to develop.
Day also stresses the ethics required of a legal secretary. “You don’t discuss clients inside the office or outside,” she says.
A visitor to Roth Blair will still see cabinets
filled with manila folders and accordion folders
that contain papers the lawyers worked on. The firm is scanning all that paperwork to an electronic format.
Some businesses no longer have secretaries although they still have a receptionist at the entrance who also answers the phone before routing it. The James & Sons insurance agency on Market Street hasn’t had a secretary in years say its CEO, Tom Costello, also a Boardman Township trustee.
A receptionist still answers the phones and greets customers who come to the office. But she, like all who work at James & Sons, “is a licensed agent,” Costello notes.
Costello, an insurance agent 42 years and with James & Son 32, remembers when a computer was installed at the office “and the staff shared it, one hour a day. Today everyone has a computer at their desk and dual monitors.”
Paper has almost disappeared. “Policies come back to us in electronic form [and] everyone is proficient at keyboarding.”
Eliminating paper has the added benefit of fewer errors made in insurance policies because documents are not copied and recopied by hand, Costello says.
A relic of the pre-computer era, “a manual typewriter that works,” is all that remains.
“Filing is all electronic,” says operations manager Stephanie Maroni, and has been for a decade. The paper files were scanned “within weeks. I don’t know how many filing cabinets we eliminated.”
She remembers learning to type on an electric typewriter in 1989 and shorthand. “I think I took the last class offered,” Maroni says. Maroni earned her B.S. in business administration at YSU and while she has performed, and continues to perform, clerical work, she was never a secretary.
Customers’ policies are kept in the office with copies emailed to the insurance company that underwrites them.
At the Boardman Township administrative offices, Costello says, neither the township administrator, Jason Loree, who has a master’s in public administration, nor the deputy administrator, who has an MBA, “has any secretarial support. Most everything they do is online,” Costello says.
There are secretaries, however, in the fire prevention office, in the police department and zoning office. “We just hired on in the zoning office last month,” the trustee relates. “We had 60 applicants and the woman we hired had worked at MS [Consultants] nine years.
Banks still employ secretaries but they are outnumbered by administrative assistants and no longer are there secretarial pools, at least at Huntington Bank, says Cari Waugh, a senior human resources officer.
Where lending officers and assistant vice presidents shared the services of a secretary – even back then “You had to be at a certain level to get individual support,” Waugh says – that level is even higher today.
The mortgage department might have the largest number of secretaries because of the number of paper documents involved, but administrative assistants serve commercial and retail lending operations. These employees are responsible for maintaining correspondence, arranging travel and setting calendars, maintaining files and filing the officers’ expense reports.
Where Huntington once administered typing tests to applicants, the bank is more concerned about the applicants’ proficiency on a computer and ability to organize in the absence of explicit instructions, Waugh says. And, she relates, more men are administrative assistants.
The computer and Internet have transformed the business world and reduced the need for secretaries who merely record, type and file. The volume of first-class mail the U.S. Postal Service delivers has plummeted as even lawyers rely mostly on email and the volume of certified and registered letters has slowed to a trickle, Roth Blair’s Roberts says.
Those who remember the office of even a quarter century ago are given to nostalgia from time to time. In the source of interviews for this story came expressions of wistfulness for the typewriter. Businessmen noted it’s easier to address an envelope or two with a typewriter than to walk to the printer to collect them.
And Marilyn Waddell, the St. E’s executive assistant who last took shorthand last spring, says she gets requests to teach shorthand classes. Those urging her seem to feel it’s a skill that shouldn’t be allowed to disappear.
EDITOR'S NOTE: First published in the MidSeptember edition of The Business Journal.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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