Join us for
21st - 23rd May 2025
The role of the Assistant has changed beyond recognition. The press is full of stories about how the role is disappearing and we know that many of the task-based parts of the job are either being outsourced or taken over by artificial intelligence.
So where does that leave you?
There has never been a more confusing time to be an Assistant because the responsibilities have developed so fast. And you have never needed to prove your value to business and what you contribute to the bottom line so categorically.
In this Masterclass, Lucy Brazier OBE looks at the role past, present and future to explain why it has developed how it has. She explores the opportunities that this creates for you to become a true Business Partner to your Executive including developing the partnership, establishing the ground rules, communication, adapting to style & maintaining a great partnership.
Times: Australia (AEST) - 11am - 4pm, New Zealand (NZST) - 1pm - 6pm, Singapore (SGT) - 9am - 2pm, Bangladesh (BST) - 7am - 12pm, New Delhi (IST) - 6.30am - 11.30am, Tokyo (JST) - 10am - 3pm, Papua New Guinea (PGT) - 11am - 4pm, Hanoi (ICT) - 8am - 1pm
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CEO, Marcham Publishing | International Speaker | Author of ‘The Modern-Day Assistant: Build Your Influence and Boost Your Potential’ | Expert on the Administrative Sector
The visionary Lucy Brazier is one of the world’s leading authorities on the administrative profession.
She is the CEO of Marcham Publishing, a global force synonymous with world-class conferences and training, including Executive Support LIVE and Modern-Day Assistant, and home of Executive Support Magazine, the gold standard of training in print for administrative professionals.
Author of ‘The Modern-Day Assistant: Build Your Influence and Boost Your Potential’, Lucy is passionate about ensuring the Assistant role is truly recognised as a career and not just a job and is dedicated to supporting the development of both senior and aspiring administrative professionals.
Her formidable training expertise and speaking style have given her opportunities to train, present and emcee events in over 50 countries at over 650 events, including chairing the 2015 World Administrators Summit in Papua New Guinea and co-facilitating every World Administrators Summit since. Lucy has keynoted at almost every major conference for Assistants in the world.
She has a unique overview of the role and where it is heading. With access to the most forward-thinking, passionate and knowledgeable trainers and administrative business leaders in the world, as well as personally meeting and speaking to thousands of Assistants for more than a decade, her knowledge of the market and what Assistants all over the world are facing on a day-to-day basis is second to none.
Lucy’s work in the field has led to thousands of Assistants and executives working more effectively together. Her training and ongoing conversations have resulted in promotions, internal networks and career frameworks being created in some of the biggest companies in the world; college students seeing the Assistant role as a proper profession with a career path; and businesses, HR and executives finally understanding how to measure performance to best utilise their Assistants. The work being conducted worldwide with the publication of the Global Skills Matrix is one of Lucy’s key drivers, and she is working with some of the most recognisable companies on the planet to consult on restructuring and training their Business Support functions.
In 2021, Lucy was awarded an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) from the Queen for services to office professionals. She has also received an Honorary Fellowship to the Institute of Administrative Management – one of the oldest management institutes in the world, having inspired professional business managers and administrators since 1915 – in recognition of her work to drive the profession forward.
All aspiring & senior Administrative Professionals, looking to enhance their skills from a level 3 to 4 based upon the Global Skills Matrix.
Let us give you the inside track – the most successful businesses understand how to use their Assistants as strategic business partners. The days of Assistants typing, answering phones, and doing gentle diary management are long gone. These days they are more likely to be found knee deep in project management, strategic research, reports & financial forecasts.
Increasingly, Executives are freeing up their time by utilizing their Assistants to fill the gaps where their weaknesses lie – allowing them time and space to get on with the things they are best at. Just think of the implications this has for increasing bottom line performance.
The first session is all about positioning. Lucy Brazier looks at the role past, present and future to explain why it has developed how it has. She explores the opportunities that this creates for you to become a true Business Partner to your Executive including developing the partnership, establishing the ground rules, communication, adapting to style & maintaining a great partnership.
This course is designed to inspire, motivate, challenge, excite about the opportunities that exist in this role. It also provides very practical training, tools, and tips – real business solutions that you will take back to the office and implement immediately to improve your systems and productivity.
Becoming a leader at work can be a challenge, especially for an Assistant, but with today’s CEOs increasingly listing leadership skills as one of the key qualities that they want from their Assistant, Lucy will examine how personal leadership is the key to establishing yourself as a leader in the workplace and which skill sets you will need to cultivate to lead up and position yourself as
the influential leader that your executive needs.
Communication is key and essential to any role, especially within the role of an assistant. It is crucial that you have effective communication with your manager, to help build a stronger and more reliable working relationship.
With the skills from this session, you will be able to go back to your office and communicate more effectively not just with your manager, but other work colleagues as well. In time, you will see how it will help you to save time and build self-confidence within your role.
We will explore how success as an assistant begins with an understanding of yourself. During the session, we will look at, the Belbin Psychometric testing exercise to explore strengths, weaknesses and where you fit into your team, Johari Window — opportunities from self-awareness, your beliefs, values and behaviours, your Inner Voice, how body language can make a difference and how important communication is.
A key skill for every assistant is how to listen to understand rather than listen to answer. In this session, we will look at how misunderstandings occur, why failure to communicate properly can lead to toxic environments filled with politics and competing egos, and how failing to use emotional intelligence properly results in living at a low level of effectiveness, which ensures we will never achieve our greatest aspirations.
The relationship between an Assistant and their Executives is crucial to a company’s success but with the average age that most Managers get training sitting at 42, many Executives have never had training in how to manage their Assistants. It, therefore, falls to the Assistant to train their Executives how to use their skills to best advantage themselves and the company.
In this session we will explore:
But what if you have more than one manager? In the new role, most Assistants are managing at least two people. It is challenging enough to work well with ONE Executive, but if you are working for two – or MORE – the challenge is stressful at best. Are you dealing with two or more workloads, managing multiple communications and schedules, multiple projects and more?
We will also look at practical tips for productivity and time management that will ensure that you can prioritize, juggle, and support your numerous Executives effectively and without stress.
Much has been made in recent times of the emergence of the Assistant as a Strategic Business Partner. The term is THE buzz word in the industry. But how do you become strategic? What does it mean? How do you change your day-to-day role to become the Assistant that your Executive needs to deliver at the highest levels? In this keynote session, Lucy Brazier will look at how to develop your business acumen to best support your executive and what skills are required to futureproof your career in a post-COVID / AI world.
Learning objectives:
The Assistant’s role is to ensure that their Executive(s) are as effective as they can possibly be. In order to do this, their own productivity and systems must be operating at the highest levels of efficiently.
In this session we will look at systems and procedures including:
For many assistants, working in the office from Monday to Friday will be a thing of the past. As offices reopen, many are turning to a hybrid model that allows people to work in the office some days and at home for others. While being able to work remotely offers more flexibility, there’s going to be a learning curve, for both companies and their employees.
In this interactive session, we will look at new ways of working, both in terms of your partnership with your executive and making your team feel supported and comfortable. We will cover what a successful hybrid work reality looks like, collaborative working practices, how to align days with your manager’s schedule and other colleagues you work frequently with, what the potential unclear implications could be and how to make the most of your time both in the office and at home.
We will also discuss what the unknowns are that concern you, how to implement systems and workflows to maximise your time wherever you are working from, and why it is so important to be proactive when it comes to communicating, collaborating, and providing status updates.
Project Management seems to be overtaking the Executive Assistant’s world these days. Whether or not your company calls it “Project Management” and deliberately applies its terminology and principles doesn’t matter; the reality is that Project Management is now part of every Assistant’s working life.
We will look at:
We will then organize an event from start to finish using the techniques we have used to determine ROI and manage the project from a budget.
With the changes to the role, many assistants are taking on more supervisory roles: Executives can help empower their assistants by making it clear that the assistant has real authority. The message the executive should convey is, “I trust this person to represent me and make decisions.”
This session will visit some classic and brand-new decision-making and problem-solving processes to ensure the Assistant has the confidence to look at all the options and weigh up the alternatives.
And finally, we will talk about how you achieve all of this without blowing a fuse.
We offer group discounts, and we can offer custom solutions! Talk through your training requirements with one of our friendly team and let us work with you to design a programme to suit your needs. Contact us here >
Would you like to chat about your training options for the rest of 2024 or for 2025?
Or would you like to talk to someone about training options for your team?
Sophie Douglas and Elaine Williams are our Senior Training Advisors and have over six years of experience advising assistants on their career journeys and what training will best suit their needs.
Contact us for a free half-hour chat
The Modern Day Assistant course is an IAAP and an ASAP approved programme and you can earn both IAAP and PACE recertification points by attending. Please contact us for details.
The course is also endorsed by the Institute of Administrative Management, one of the oldest management institutes in the world, having inspired professional business managers and administrators since 1915 and by International Management Assistants, a global association founded in 1974, currently represented in more than 30 countries.