Project Materials

THE EVALUATION OF THE PERFORMANCE OF A PROFESSIONAL SECRETARY AND A COMPUTER OPERATOR IN AN ORGANIZATION

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 The Background of the Study

Secretaries and computer operators are often confused or neglected in many organisations, whether they are public or private sector. But in bygone days, secretaries could only take notes in their brains, type them up, and file them away.

Perhaps the expansion of secretarial responsibilities into areas traditionally handled by professional and managerial staff has resulted from the proliferation of office and company technology.

Nowadays, companies are looking for secretaries with expertise in areas such as capital markets, security legislation, and cooperative governance in addition to traditional clerical and administrative skills. In its current form, technology has permeated all facets of secretarial work, including document organisation, sorting, and storage.

The fundamental secretarial tasks of data collection, transport, processing, and transmission are amenable to computerisation, according to Aku (2004). As a result, the majority of the tasks once performed by the office professional secretary are now being done more efficiently and effectively through the use of computers.

Hill (2003), An executive or corporate official’s secretary handles incoming mail, takes and sorts messages, makes and returns phone calls, and performs other clerical tasks. If you want to know how good a professional secretary or computer operator is, you have to do the right checks and balances.

Wynel (2010) defines performance as an inventory of individual and team strengths and areas for improvement as it relates to the job. Therefore, evaluating an employee’s performance entails looking at how well they did in relation to the goals that were set.

Since an organization’s output is directly proportional to its performance, a secretary’s output can be seen by observing the duties completed and the level of specialisation in those responsibilities.

Typing documents and receiving and sending emails are temporary responsibilities of computer operators who have obtained a diploma or certificate in computer training. These tasks share certain parallels with secretaries, thus people often mistake them for one another.