The Compounding Advantage
Why the skills you build as an EA become your biggest long-term career asset
There is a narrative that floats around the EA world from time to time that I fundamentally disagree with. It’s the idea that assistants are somehow “stuck”, under-utilised, or quietly wasting their potential while everyone else climbs the ladder.
I simply do not see that reflected in reality.
In fact, the opposite is often true. Many of the most capable operators I know started their careers as Executive Assistants (including me!). They now run operations teams, lead transformation projects, manage entire business units, or sit in Chief of Staff roles. And when you look closely at their trajectory, you start to see a pattern.
The skills they built as assistants compounded. This was certainly the case for me.
We EAs develop an unusually powerful mix of operational awareness, commercial judgement, and leadership proximity. We sit close enough to strategy to understand how decisions are made, and close enough to execution to see what actually works in practice. Over time, that combination becomes incredibly valuable.
It is one of the few roles in an organisation where you see the entire system.
You see which projects stall and why. You see how decisions are really made when the meeting ends. You see how leadership teams behave under pressure. You see the gaps between strategy and execution long before anyone writes a slide deck about them.
If you stay curious, that vantage point becomes your career accelerator.
What many people underestimate is just how transferable the EA skillset really is. The ability to manage competing priorities, structure ambiguous problems, anticipate risk, and coordinate senior stakeholders are not administrative skills. They are operational ones.
Those same capabilities sit at the heart of roles like Head of Operations, Programme Director, and Revenue Operations leader, and I say this not theoretically, but from personal experience.
I started my career as an Executive Assistant. Over time, that role expanded into running large projects, leading operational improvements, and eventually moving fully into commercial operations and strategy roles. None of that happened overnight, but every step built directly on the capabilities I developed as an assistant. I still lean on those skills to this day.
The assistant role gave me something many early-career professionals never receive: a front-row seat to how organisations actually work. I didn’t start at the “bottom” - I had a front row seat at the top.
The assistants who progress the fastest are usually the ones who treat that seat as an education.
They pay attention to the patterns behind decisions. They notice which leaders create momentum and which ones create noise and what happens to them. They watch how budgets are negotiated, how priorities are set, and how influence flows through the organisation.
Over time, that observation turns into instinct, and it’s that instinct which separates operators from administrators.
