Executive Secretary

We are looking for a competent Executive Secretary to support high-ranking officials in our company. You will be the one to organize and maintain the executive’s schedule and assist them by performing a variety of administrative tasks.

Executive secretaries must be quick professionals with great time-management and multitasking abilities. It is with their diligence and competence in their work that executives can focus on their managerial responsibilities without worrying for other tasks.

The goal is to contribute to the efficiency of the overall business by ensuring all assigned administrative duties are carried on timely and efficiently.

Responsibilities

• Maintain executive’s agenda and assist in planning appointments, board meetings, conferences, etc;

• Attend meetings and keep minutes;

• Receive and screen phone calls and redirect them when appropriate;

• Handle and prioritize all outgoing or incoming correspondence (e-mail, letters, packages etc.);

• Make travel arrangements for executives;

• Handle confidential documents ensuring they remain secure;

• Prepare invoices or financial statements and provide assistance in bookkeeping;

• Monitor office supplies and negotiate terms with suppliers to ensure the most cost-effective orders;

• Maintain electronic and paper records ensuring information is organized and easily accessible;

• Conduct research and prepare presentations or reports as assigned.

Requirements 

• Proven experience as executive secretary or similar administrative role;  Proficient in MS Office and “back-office” software (e.g. ERP);

• In depth knowledge of office management as well as technical vocabulary of relevant industry;

• Familiarity with basic research methods and reporting techniques;

• Excellent organizational and time-management skills;

• Outstanding communication and negotiation abilities;

• Integrity and confidentiality;

• Degree in business administration or relative field.

(Adapted from: https://resources.workable.com/executive-secretary-job-description)

Read TEXT 3 and answer question.  

TEXT 3  

THE PAPERLESS CLASSROOM IS COMING  

Michael Scherer

Back-to-school night this year in Mr. G’s sixth-grade classroom felt a bit like an inquisition.

Teacher Matthew Gudenius, a boyish, 36-year-old computer whiz who runs his class like a preteen tech startup, had prepared 26 PowerPoint slides filled with facts and footnotes to deflect the concerns of parents. But time was short, the worries were many, and it didn’t take long for the venting to begin.

“I like a paper book. I don’t like an e-book,” one father told him, as about 30 adults squeezed into a room for 22 students. Another dad said he could no longer help his son with homework because all the assignments were online. “I’m now kind of taking out of the routine.”, he complained. Rushing to finish, Gudenius passed a slide about the debate over teaching cursive, mumbling, “We don’t care about handwriting.” In a flash a mother objected: “Yeah, we do.”

At issue was far more than penmanship. The future of K-12 education is arriving fast, and it looks a lot like Mr. G’s classroom in the northern foothills of California’s wine country. Last year, President Obama announced a federal effort to get a laptop, tablet or smartphone into the hands of every student in every school in the U.S. and to pipe in enough bandwidth to get all 49.8 million American kids online simultaneously by 2017. Bulky textbooks will be replaced by flat screens. Worksheets will be stored in the cloud, not clunky Trapper Keepers. The Dewey decimal system will give way to Google. “This one is a big, big deal,” says Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

It’s a deal Gudenius has been working to realize for years. He doesn’t just teach a computer on every student’s desk; he also tries to do it without any paper at all, saving, by his own estimate, 46,800 sheets a year, or about four trees. The paperless learning environment, while not the goals of most fledgling programs, represents the ultimate result of technology transforming classroom.

Gudenius started teaching as a computer-lab instructor, seeing students for just a few hours each month. That much time is still the norm for most kids. American schools have about 3.6 students for every classroom computing device, according to Education Market Research, and only 1 in 5 school buildings has the wiring to get all students online at once. But Gudenius always saw computers as a tool, not a subject. “We don’t have a paper-and-pencil lab, he says. When you are learning to be a mechanic, you don’t go to a wrench lab.”

Ask his students if they prefer the digital to the tree-based technology and everyone will say yes. It is not unusual for kids to groan when the bell rings because they don’t want to leave their work, which is often done in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. Instead of telling his students to show their work when they do an algebra equation, Gudenius asks them to create and narrate a video about the process, which can then be shown in class. History lessons are enlivened by brief videos that run on individual tablets. And spelling, grammar and vocabulary exercises have the feel of a game, with each student working at his own speed, until Gudenius – who tracks the kids’ progress on a smartphone – gives commands like “Spin it” to let the kids know to flip the screens of their devices around so that he can see their work and begin the next lesson.

Source: TIME- How to Eat Now. Education: The Paperless Classroom is Coming, p. 36-37; October 20, 2014 

                                 LARGEST AIRCRAFT IN THE WORLD

      We have lift-off. The world's largest aircraft has taken to the skies for the first time.The Airlander 10 spent nearly two hours in the air, having taken off from Cardington Airfield in Bedfordshire. During its flight, it reached 3,000 feet (914 meters) and performed a series of gentle turns all over a safe area.

      The aircraft is massive – as long as a football pitch and as tall as six double decker buses and capable of flying for up to five days. It was first developed for the US government as a long-rangesurveillance aircraft but was scrapped following cutbacks.

      Each one cost 25 million pounds and can carry heavier loads than jumbo jets while also producing less noise and emitting less pollution. The makers, Hybrid Air Vehicles, believe it‟s the future of aircraft, and that one day we'll be using them to get places.

      But we're a while away yet. The Airlander will need to clock up 200 hours‟ flying time before beingdeemed airworthy by aviation bodies. If it passes though, we can hope we'll all get some extra leg room.

Text IV

                       Identity and Interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach

      Different research traditions within sociocultural linguistics have particular strengths in analyzing the varied dimensions of identity outlined in this article. The method of analysis selected by the researcher makes salient which aspect of identity comes into view, and such 'partial accounts' contribute to the broader understanding of identity that we advocate here. Although these lines of research have often remained separate from one another, the combination of their diverse theoretical and methodological strengths  ‒  including the microanalysis of conversation, the macroanalysis of ideological processes, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of linguistic structures, and the ethnographic focus on local cultural practices and social groupings  ‒  calls attention to the fact that identity in all its complexity can never be contained within a single analysis. For this reason, it is necessary to conceive of sociocultural linguistics broadly and inclusively. The five principles proposed here  ‒  Emergence, Positionality, Indexicality, Relationality, and Partialness  ‒ represent the varied ways in which different kinds of scholars currently approach the question of identity. Even researchers whose primary goals lie elsewhere can contribute to this project by providing sophisticated conceptualizations of how human dynamics unfold in discourse, along with rigorous analytic tools for discovering how such processes work. While identity has been a widely circulating notion in sociocultural linguistic research for some time, few scholars have explicitly theorized the concept. The present article offers one way of understanding this body of work by anchoring identity in interaction. By positing, in keeping with recent scholarship, that identity is emergent in discourse and does not precede it, we are able to locate identity as an intersubjectively achieved social and cultural phenomenon. This discursive approach further allows us to incorporate within identity not only the broad sociological categories most commonly associated with the concept, but also more local positionings, both ethnographic and interactional. The linguistic resources that indexically produce identity at all these levels are therefore necessarily broad and flexible, including labels, implicatures, stances, styles, and entire languages and varieties. Because these tools are put to use in interaction, the process of identity construction does not reside within the individual but in intersubjective relations of sameness and difference, realness and fakeness, power and disempowerment. Finally, by theorizing agency as a broader phenomenon than simply individualistic and deliberate action, we are able to call attention to the myriad ways that identity comes into being, from habitual practice to interactional negotiation to representations and ideologies.

      It is no overstatement to assert that the age of identity is upon us, not only in sociocultural linguistics but also in the human and social sciences more generally. Scholars of language use are particularly well equipped to provide an empirically viable account of the complexities of identity as a social, cultural, and ‒ most fundamentally ‒ interactional phenomenon. The recognition of the loose coalition of approaches that we call sociocultural linguistics is a necessary step in advancing this goal, for it is only by understanding our diverse theories and methods as complementary, not competing, that we can meaningfully interpret this crucial dimension of contemporary social life.

(BUCHOLTZ, M.; HALL, K. Identity and interaction: a sociocultural approach. In: Discourse Studies, vol 7 (4‐5). London: SAGE, 2005. pp. 585‐614.)