Administrative Professional Job Titles

By Karen Porter

Administrative assistant and executive assistant are popular titles for administrative professionals but not the only titles in use for these office professionals. Read more about job titles for administrative professionals below.

First, the good news. If you are looking for a selection of administrative professional job titles, your choices are many. In fact, there are probably one- to two-hundred job titles in use right now by administrative professionals. Some are just small variations such as administrative assistant, administrative assistant to the general manager, administrative assistant III, and admin assistant 3. Or executive assistant, executive assistant to John/Mary Doe, and executive assistant secretary. These little differences in administrative job titles for administrative professionals are what add up to the “hundreds” of different job titles for administrative professionals overall.

Now the bad news. If you are looking to select an administrative professional job title, your choices are many. Wait…wasn’t that the good news too? Sort of. The difficulty here is that there are so many different job titles in use for administrative professionals nationally (and globally there are more) that it’s hard to say with certainty that “this” administrative job title goes with “these” administrative duties or that “this” administrative job title is higher ranking than “that” administrative job title. For instance, is the hierarchy administrative assistant I, administrative assistant II, administrative assistant III, and then administrative assistant IV (highest to lowest level), or is it just the opposite, IV, III, II, and I (highest to lowest)? Unfortunately, I’ve seen it both ways (but at different companies).

Additionally, you probably want to choose an administrative job title that matches your specific duties or research to see if the job title you have now matches your particular administrative duties. However, the same job titles in use overall can have different meanings at different companies. Ugh! That’s confusing.

Here are some of the more popular administrative job titles in use today:

  • administrative assistant
  • administrative secretary
  • executive administrative assistant
  • executive assistant
  • senior administrative assistant (and sr. administrative assistant)

And there’s more:

You will find titles that start with “administrative,” for instance, and end in words like specialist, coordinator, associate, etc. So you have these administrative job titles:

  • administrative coordinator
  • administrative associate
  • administrative specialist
  • hr coordinator
  • project coordinator
  • sales coordinator
  • sales support specialist
  • senior administrative associate

So you see how you can tag on one of those words to the end of a title and create dozens of more administrative job titles. Most of these variations of the administrative support job title are still in use today even if not as well used as your basic titles of administrative assistant and executive assistant — and also personal assistant (which is usually a job combination of executive assistant and personal assistant).

Plus…

Another popular administrative professional job title is to tie the job title to a specific person or position like this:

  • executive assistant to general to CEO
  • executive assistant to Mary Jones, xyz job title
  • assistant to the vice president of operations
  • assistant to vice president of operations Joe Davis
  • human resources administrative assistant
  • development department assistant

And there are job titles clearly stated by hierarchy…

Already briefly mentioned is that a lot of administrative job titles tag on levels such as 1, 2, 3 and 4 or I, II, III and IV. Also, sr. and senior. So you have administrative job titles like these:

  • senior administrative secretary
  • senior executive assistant
  • administrative assistant III

And here’s a tricky office title to classify at times:

  • office manager

This one is tricky because if you’re reading this page, you probably want to know if this is an administrative professional job title. The answer is sometimes. It is definitely an office job title and sometimes it falls under the administrative professional field and sometimes it doesn’t. It really depends on the duties of the role and how the particular company defines their office manager role.

Also, a company may have the same person doing two roles with a dual title such as administrative assistant/office manager. Not every company has the budget or need to fill both roles.

Up and coming popular administrative job titles:

The above examples on this page are not comprehensive but do give you an example of current administrative job titles and those administrative office job titles of recent decades (meaning all are still in use and they’ve been around for years). However, there are some newer administrative job titles as noted below. Some of these may have been around in past years too but infrequently; now they are being used more frequently by administrative professionals:

  • administrative services manager
  • director of administrative services
  • chief executive administrator

And there will be more administrative professional job titles coming. The administrative profession is always evolving, and people involved in it -whether as assistants or employers — are always looking for just the right title to describe their administrative job duties and positions.