Are we seeing the demise of secretaries as a career option?

Secretaries traditionally have been highly valued and prized employees in the workplace. For many years in quite a few industries, secretaries have been able to enjoy a high status level within the company they work in.

Quite often secretaries who have been in a job for a long time can attract a higher salary than some of the more senior staff or skilled workers. This is because they tend to work closely with their employers and their employers begin to rely on them for lots of different day-to-day tasks.

However, all of that has changed with the advent of external transcription.

Transcription and Typing Services have sprung up all over the world in recent years. Due to the increase in digital recording products it has become very easy for companies to lower their costs by employing the services of an external transcription business.

A company can be based in Bristol in the UK, use a web design company in the Ukraine and employ secretaries and transcribers anywhere in the world.

The costs savings are astronomical.

Secretaries can earn anything from 15,000 up to 45,000 pounds. These figures are for the UK only and in the US they are matched very often in Dollars at a higher level.

Outsourcing all your dictation and typing needs over a period of 12 months could save quite simply astronomical sums because the transcriber can be used on an as and when basis.

Companies do not need to have an employee sat at a desk waiting for work to come in but instead can simply send it out as and when the work comes in and get it back again in a very short space of time.

The same applies to telephone services. You do not need employees on site to answer the telephone because there are plenty of external providers who are able to offer this service on an as and when basis. So again companies do not need staff to be on the premises for 8 hours a day with some of that time not being productive.

So as to the original question as to whether the secretary profession is one that will survive, the answer is probably yes but in a very highly specialist form. Secretaries will become more like personal assistants and executive PAs, needing to provide a wide range of services to their employer but does not just include answering a telephone and typing but also providing back-up, support and additional services. Without these extra services it is unlikely that anyone will survive as a secretary through the online transcription and typing revolution.