Pa

"PA" stands for personal assistant - someone who manages the working life of one or more senior people (a director, partner, consultant, headteacher, MP or chief executive). The job is to control their diary, handle their inbox and correspondence, organise travel and meetings, and take enough administrative load off them that they can spend their time on the things only they can do. In practice a PA often becomes the gatekeeper and information hub for a whole team or department.

Starting salary: £22k–£28k
Live graduate jobs: 6 open now
Main way in: Direct application to an advertised PA or executive assistant…
They usually ask for: A degree is not required for most PA roles

Approximate graduate salary

Entry-level administrator and junior PA roles typically start around £22,000–£28,000, rising to roughly £30,000–£45,000 for an established PA, with experienced executive assistants supporting senior leaders earning substantially more. These are broad approximations and vary a great deal by sector and especially by location - London rates are noticeably higher than much of the rest of the UK.

What you'd actually do

Running one or more diaries: booking, moving and protecting meetings, resolving clashes, building in travel time, and deciding which requests for the boss's time get accepted, deferred or declined on their behalf.
Managing an inbox - filtering, flagging what genuinely needs the executive, drafting replies in their name, and chasing people who owe them answers or documents.
Organising meetings end to end: booking rooms or video calls, pulling together agendas and papers, circulating them in advance, taking minutes or action notes, then chasing the actions afterwards.
Arranging travel - flights, trains, hotels, visas, itineraries - and sorting out the mess when a train is cancelled or a meeting overruns and the whole day has to be rebuilt.

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Processing expenses, raising purchase orders, handling invoices and keeping track of a budget or departmental spend, depending on the organisation.
Acting as the first point of contact for the executive: fielding phone calls and visitors, triaging queries, and passing on only what needs passing on.
Preparing documents and presentations - formatting reports, proofreading slide decks, compiling briefing packs so the executive walks into a meeting knowing who is in the room and what they want.

How graduates get in

Direct application to an advertised PA or executive assistant vacancy. This is by far the most common route - PA roles are rarely filled through structured graduate schemes.
Starting as a team administrator, office administrator, receptionist or administrative assistant and moving up to PA once you have proved you can handle a diary and sensitive information. This is the standard path and often takes a couple of years.
Temping through an office-support recruitment agency. Agencies place a lot of PA and admin cover, and temp assignments regularly turn into permanent roles - this is a genuinely good way in if you have little experience.
Internal moves within a sector you already work in - for example a university administrator becoming PA to a dean, or an NHS band-level admin becoming PA to a clinical director. Sector knowledge counts for a lot here.

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Specialist routes where the PA role is legally or technically flavoured: legal PA or legal secretary roles in law firms, or medical secretary roles in the NHS and private healthcare, which may expect or fund specific qualifications such as audio typing or medical terminology.
Graduate schemes do exist in business support and office management at some larger organisations, but they are uncommon - do not build your plan around finding one.

What employers ask for

A degree is not required for most PA roles, and the subject almost never matters. Plenty of excellent PAs have no degree at all. Where a degree is asked for, it is usually as a general screen rather than for specific content.
Solid English and maths at GCSE level, or equivalent, is a common baseline - the job involves writing on someone else's behalf and handling numbers in expenses and budgets.
Demonstrable administrative experience is what employers actually weigh most heavily. Any office, reception, customer service or student-society admin experience is worth putting on the CV.
Confident use of Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and increasingly Teams, SharePoint or Google Workspace. Some employers test this at interview with a practical exercise.

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Typing speed and accuracy matters in some settings - legal and medical secretarial roles in particular may test audio typing or digital dictation. In corporate PA roles it is rarely formally tested.
Optional qualifications that can help but are not expected: Level 3 or 4 business administration apprenticeship standards, or courses and membership routes offered by professional bodies for executive assistants and administrative professionals.

Skills that matter

Diary judgement

The core of the job is deciding, often without asking, which meeting matters more when two clash and what the executive would want you to do - getting this right is what separates a PA from a booking clerk.

Discretion with confidential information

You will see restructures, salary information, disciplinary matters and commercially sensitive deals before almost anyone else, and the role collapses the moment people stop trusting you with it.

Writing in someone else's voice

You will draft emails, letters and messages that go out under the executive's name, so you need to match their tone and know what they would and would not say.

Prioritising under constant interruption

A PA's day is interrupted continuously by phone calls, walk-ups and urgent requests, so you have to hold several half-finished tasks and keep reordering them without dropping anything.

Polite persistence when chasing people

A large part of the job is getting documents, approvals and answers out of senior people who are ignoring you, repeatedly, without annoying them.

Attention to detail in logistics

A wrong room number, a flight booked for the wrong day or an unsigned document can waste a senior person's entire day, and the mistakes are highly visible.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Administrator or team assistant, supporting a group rather than an individual - this is where most people start and where you learn the systems.
PA to a single manager or mid-level director, then PA to a more senior executive. Moving up usually means supporting someone more senior rather than gaining a new job title, and the pay follows seniority of the person supported.
Executive assistant (EA) to a C-suite leader or chief executive, often with more involvement in strategy, board papers, governance and managing the executive's external relationships. Timelines vary a lot - some people reach this in five or six years, others take far longer or never want to.
Office manager, business support manager or head of business support, managing a team of administrators, facilities, suppliers and budgets.
Sideways moves out of the PA track are common and often deliberate: into HR, operations, events management, project coordination, governance and company secretarial work, or communications. The exposure a PA gets to how an organisation really runs makes these moves credible.

What people get wrong

“It is essentially typing, filing and making coffee - a stopgap job rather than a career.”

At senior level a PA or EA makes real judgement calls daily about who gets access to a decision-maker, sits in on confidential conversations, and often knows more about how the organisation actually functions than most managers. Experienced EAs supporting chief executives can be very well paid and are genuinely hard to replace.

“A PA just does what they are told.”

The best PAs work out what the executive needs before being asked and act on it - rearranging a day, preparing a briefing nobody requested, or quietly telling someone no. Executives who want a purely reactive assistant usually end up with a diary that falls apart.

“'PA' and 'secretary' and 'EA' are all the same thing with different labels.”

There are real differences in practice. A secretary typically supports a function or team with typing, document production and correspondence; a PA supports a named individual and owns their diary and inbox; an EA usually supports a senior leader and takes on project, budget and governance work. Job adverts do blur the terms, so read the duties rather than the title.

“It is a nine-to-five job with clean boundaries.”

This varies a lot by employer, but many PA roles mean checking messages when your executive is travelling, handling things across time zones, or dealing with a cancelled flight on a Sunday evening. Some organisations - universities, public sector, many charities - are much more contained than private-sector or political roles.

Where this varies

The job changes shape a lot depending on where you do it. In law firms, a legal PA or legal secretary handles document production, court and client correspondence and billing, often supporting several fee-earners at once. In the NHS, medical secretaries manage clinic letters, patient correspondence and referral pathways, and need medical terminology. In universities and the public sector, the role leans towards committee servicing, minute-taking and governance, with more predictable hours. In corporate and financial services, the emphasis is on complex international travel, board papers and gatekeeping, usually with higher pay and less predictable hours. In politics and the charity sector, titles blur and a PA may also do casework, research or communications. A final note on ambiguity: "PA" in a job advert occasionally means something else entirely - in healthcare it can mean physician associate, and in audio-visual work it can mean public address. Check the advert's duties before applying.

See all 6 live Pa jobsFrom employers' own careers sites, updated daily Tailor your CV for this roleFree with an account, 3 a month

General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.

Pa