With each passing day, the Internet plays a bigger and more important role in the way business is conducted. From large corporations to small local businesses, the Internet is the foundation of everything from marketing to communications. While it behooves the office manager and/or the company director to be familiar with IT (Information Technology), those tasks are more commonly delegated to office assistants who are the ones out there in the trenches, so to speak.
Whether you are a veteran office worker or new on the job, the one thing to remember is that you are living and working in the 21st Century and, as such, it pays to master a few basic online skills in order to excel in your job. Here are three of those skills you must know.
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1. Working in the Cloud
One of the most important skills you can master as an office assistant/worker is to familiarize yourself with Cloud-based technology. This is especially useful if you are tasked with overseeing jobs done in the field. Cloud-based platforms enable you to see, at a glance, what everyone is doing at any given moment in time. Each employee is given a certain level of access and as an office worker, you will probably be somewhere up near the top of the totem pole.
Not only can you assign and keep track of jobs, but you have a quick and easy way to report progress to your superiors and keep any books or logs necessary for accounting. It’s amazing just how efficient the Cloud is for keeping everyone apprised of what other departments are doing, the progress they’ve made, and if you want to guarantee a future with your company, the Cloud is the one resource you must master!
2. Where to Find the Information and Resources You Need
Even data entry clerks need to familiarize themselves with the Internet. Each and every day there will be a question which arises and where better to find an immediate answer to your query than the Web? For example, your boss has written a memo which you feel has a few grammatical errors. While you may be tasked with typing that memo for distribution, it is also part of your job description to fix all spelling and grammar errors. You’ve found that the headers and sub-headers are not capitalized correctly, but you aren’t really sure if you are correct.
Here you have sites like https://capitalizemytitle.com where you simply type in a line of text and it automatically capitalizes the appropriate first letters – an amazing tool for office workers tasked with editing memos and official documents. However, there are times you can’t remember the name of the site you are looking for, so you go to your favorites on the taskbar only to find that the favorites menu is missing. If this happens to you, and chances are it will at least once in your career, simple check out articles like Where Have My Favorites Gone to learn how to quickly retrieve them on literally any browser you are using.
3. Digital Communications
From social media to email to VOIP, the Internet has a wide range of choices in digital communications. Some companies use Skype VOIP while others use hard-wired lines. Others prefer to email everything to have a ‘digital’ paper trail to follow. Learn anything and everything you can about the various forms of online communications so that if one fails, another might kick in. Whether you are trying to reach a worker in the field, a client or a service provider, as the old saying goes, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
The key takeaway here is that few office workers ever sit at a typewriter or a computer not connected to the Internet. While some sites may be blocked for office workers, the majority of sites you will need to do your job efficiently will be accessible. If you want to excel at any task you are given, knowing where to find the resources you need is critical. Master the Internet and you will master your job in any office and in any position.