An administrative assistant needs to have a lot of exceptional qualities in order to rise above the realm of mediocrity. While anyone can theoretically be called an admin, there are certain qualities that will make one person great at it and another mediocre on their best day. While the traits of a good worker apply to almost anything, being an administrative assistant is a special kind of job that demands a few special traits. The following are a few such traits.

An Eye for Details

Some people say that the devil is in the details, and they're right. When you focus on the big picture, as many executives are forced to do most of the time, it's easy to gloss over a multitude of tiny details. These go way beyond where you left your keys and what you take in your coffee, and a solid admin needs to be spot on with lots of things. When it comes to filling in the gaps in a higher-up's thought process, a great assistant can finish another person's sentences before the person has even started them. A great way to spot an exceptional admin is to do the dishes with them.

Flexibility to Spare

So you're working with someone in Jakarta, and they're 8 hours ahead of you. What do you do? If you're like a lot of people, you'll "toss them an email" or "add them on Skype." But an exceptional admin will do several things, including finding out when their client's most productive time of day is and temporarily adjusting to that. If it means being up and alert at 3 am, so be it. A great admin makes results instead of excuses.

Great Organizational Skills

While everybody loses things from time to time, a great administrative assistant has a detailed system in place for both keeping what needs to be kept and accessing it in a hurry. After all, one never knows when the boss is going to race into the room needing something very urgently. Just like in the realm of military operations or self defense, during a high stress situation people fall back on the lowest common denominator of their training. If this training is solid, the admin will have everything ready in case their boss gets into a fight or flight mode... and will be cool as a cucumber in the freezer when everybody else is all but freaking out. A great admin earns ten times what they're paid, simply for keeping everyone else's work going from behind.