This course is designed to prepare students to support an administrative department in a variety of office tasks. Students compose business documents, file correspondence, use proper telephone technique, process mail, make travel arrangements, and plan meetings. A focus throughout the course is business etiquette and professionalism as related to the duties of an administrative assistant. We will extend this idea a bit further and look at how technology and business work flow is changing. Specifically, we will look at how we can use emerging and existing technologies to improve processes within the work place and develop personal skills that will increase our value to current or prospective employers. We will also focus on marketing ourselves as we go out into the workplace.
As a starting place I have developed the following list of tentative topics that we will explore during the course of the semester.
- The Future of the Workplace
- How Technology is Changing
- Connectivity and Collaboration
- Generations in the Workplace
- The Economy & Cloud Computing
- Preparing Yourself for the New Workplace
- Getting Ready for your Job Search
- Your Web 2.0 Resume
We will focus on how things get done in the workplace and the skills and technology that can help us become more efficient and improve information processing as a whole.
As a means to that end, we will work on several interrelated projects. Specifically, we will develop a Weblog (1) and an Online Portfolio (2). We will also work on a Personal Branding Project (3).
Our assignments will become the content of our weblogs as individual blog posts. And our Final will be a theme-based essay on a topic of interest from class.
