Finding Clerical Jobs that Pay Well

Typically clerical jobs are found all over the Internet. They are one of the easiest jobs to locate because of their abundance. Almost all companies have at least one or more clerical workers, often dozens of them. The outlook for clerical workers is positive. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, secretaries and administrative assistants held about 4.3 million jobs in 2008, ranking it among the largest occupations in the U.S. economy.

The main duties of clerical workers include storing, retrieving, and disseminating information to staff, acting as a liaison between client and executive, scheduling travel, booking conference rooms, planning events, overseeing budgets, creating proposals, drafting correspondence, creating company literature, emailing memos, maintaining paper and electronic files, conduct research, and direct calls over the telephone.

Other critical job duties include include creating spreadsheets, composing correspondence, managing databases, and creating presentations, reports, and documents using desktop publishing software and digital graphics. They greet guests, answer phones, direct calls, answer correspondence, manage inventories and stockrooms, and purchase supplies.

Clerical jobs are great in that all walks of people work in them. Youth, middle-aged, and older workers who struggle to find jobs can typically rely on a clerical job. This is because the job does not require a specialized education, nor does it require months and months of training to learn how to become a clerical worker. Typically job duties can be learned quickly, often within a few weeks. More complex jobs require a lot more training.

There are many types of clerical jobs. These include administrative assistants, executive assistant jobs, data entry jobs, clerical supervisor jobs, and office manager jobs. Data entry keyers input lists of items, numbers, or data such as personal information, medical records, or membership lists, into computers or complete forms. They must go back and verify that each entry is correct. They may work in billing so attention to detail is important.

Executive assistants have many duties. They provide administrative and clerical support to departments or individuals, schedule meetings and arrange conference rooms, alert manager about cancellations or new meetings, manage travel and schedule, handle information requests, prepare correspondence and stuff mail into envelopes, arrange for outgoing mail and packages to be picked up, and prepare statistical reports.

So where do workers find clerical jobs that pay well? For starters, they need to look at companies that have a history of paying their workers better-than average. Law firms and doctors' offices often give employees a good wage, especially since these workers need to put in extra hours when the office is in a time crunch.

HR assistants are another type of clerical job that pay higher than average. Most make at least $29,000 to $30,000 per year. This can go up as the HR assistant takes on more duties. These workers are responsible for maintaining the human resource records of an organization’s employees, including names, addresses, job titles, earnings, benefits and tax withholdings. They also play a hand in administering benefits.