Lament the passing of the properly personal PA
Gone are the days when getting a personal assistant was a sign that you'd arrived. These days PAs are no longer personal, they are shared; they need a new acronym.
Moreover, PAs are being shared between more and more bankers because their numbers are being thinned. The personal assistant is at the sharp end of financial services redundancies.
We saw this at Macquarie, where PAs were punished in the October redundancy round. From now on, only Macquarie's executive directors in London will get one.
We are also seeing it (vicariously, based on reports from an 'insider') at Barclays Capital, where a small handful of the predicted large basketful of redundancies is underway, and PAs are apparently in the palm.
"PAs are being spread thinly across bigger teams," Victoria Lindfield at Secretarial Recruitment specialist Tay Associates tells us. "There are still redundancies going on, but not as many as last year."
However, the PAs who stay are getting better pay.
Poolia, another recruitment agency, says the average salary for a City PA is now 31k, up from 28k last year, but down from 33k in 2007.
Regardless of the risks of being at the beck and call of entire teams of bankers, recruiters say there are lots of recent graduates who want go into PA-dom. They highlight one candidate, who after obtaining a masters degree in social science and politics, has gone to work for an MD at Goldman Sachs.
"In reality these roles are highly stressful, take a great deal of attention to detail and multi-tasking as you are running one or many bosses lives in their business and often in their personal space too," she says.
