Administrative Assistant's Update

JULY 2018 4 the annual winter festival held each February. In 2008, while working at the Soci- ety, she also attended Yukon College to earn a diploma in tourism studies and management. She chose admin- istrative assistant-relevant courses for her electives. In 2013, she joined Yukon College in an administrative capacity. Almost immediately she was asked to serve as an acting coordinator who would complete preparations for an upcom- ing education conference hosted by the college. An extrovert who sings and plays the guitar, Cowell says she honed her skills in event planning through trial and error. "At first I had no clue what I was doing," she says of her work on the Sourdough Queen competition. "I was passionate and came with some creative ideas and I wanted to do it," she says. "There was a ton of growing that went on." Through her event planning ex - periences, Cowell learned the impor- tance of being able to "read people," anticipate the needs of her boss and manage volunteers, whose contribu- tions are critical to the success of the Sourdough winter festival. She says it took her time to learn to trust others. "If you are going to … ask [people] to take this [volunteer re- sponsibility] on then you have to have the ability to trust them," she says. She adds: "Learning how to bet- ter work with people and identify strengths and different personality traits taught me a lot of my own [ten- dencies] and what I needed to let go and where I had to do better." At Yukon College, where Cowell is administrative assistant for the School of Academic and Skill Development, she reports to the chair and serves up to 20 instructors, assisting with book- ing rooms, course registration and co- ordinating student support (academic and other issues). Last year, she spoke up about her interest in doing more event planning. She says her boss, school chair Erica Bourdon, offered "awesome support" for Cowell to take an accredited course, now nearing completion, offered by the Project Management Institute. Cowell says her peers increas- ingly see her as the "go-to person" for organizing events at the college, from informal get-togethers for students to more structured events hosted by the school. She estimates an 80-20 split between her administrative and event planning duties, with the latter grow- ing as a proportion of her work. "It is always a learning curve," says Cowell, of event planning. "You have to be able to communicate well, take ownership and be flexible." Cowell, who led a workshop on event planning at the Administrative Professionals' Conference in Toronto earlier this year, told her audience she embraces a philosophy espoused by the late actress Audrey Hepburn who observed that "nothing is impossible. The word itself says I'm possible." To that end, Cowell says she always looks for a "yes" response when asked to solve a problem. "That is a huge part of why I have become better at event planning and why people look to me for it," she says. Yukon go-to admin grows into event planning Continued from page 1 Interviews probe culture questions By Staff What kinds of interview questions might you be facing if you've applied to join a company known for its strong work culture? Here's one: If you join the team, what would you tell your friends or family about why you chose to work here? It's a question designed "to probe for candidates' deeper motiva - tions," says Greg Silva, vice-president of people and culture at TextNow, a wireless company based in Waterloo, Ontario. Silva was a member of the human resources team that built a highly regarded culture at Netflix. In a recent interview with FastCompany.com, Silva shared his view that a strong culture begins at the hiring stage where culture-conscious employers are looking to hire "team members who'll help build a sup - portive, healthy, high-performing culture." Here are a few more questions Silva favours to identify "deeper motivations": • Why are you passionate about our market and what we'd be building together? • Based on what you've seen, what are a few areas where you'd focus in this role in order to address problems you believe exist today, or that we might encounter later? • You have a great idea for how to improve our product, but you're wor - ried about stepping on someone else's toes. What do you do? • Tell me about one of your most trusted mentors. What have you learned from them that's informed the way you work with others?

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