Secretaries (general)
Most tasks score high and the scores agree. Expect the role to be reorganised.
Exposure is not job loss: it shows how much of the work generative AI could do today. Whether that turns into transformation, productivity gains or cuts depends on employers, regulation — and on you.
0 = today’s generative AI cannot perform any of the job’s tasks, 100 = it could do all of them fully. The pale band is the spread across tasks.
Work out your own score ↓What can you do?
🤖 Written with AIThis text was written by artificial intelligence from the data points shown; it is built on verified figures but may contain mistakes.· 12/10/2026How is it made?
With an exposure score of 58/100, general secretaries face automated scheduling and correspondence, though significant replacement demand continues to sustain employment.
What changes
- AI tools automate meeting scheduling, calendar conflict resolution, and screening appointment requests.
- Drafting routine correspondence, formatting reports, and transcribing minutes are heavily streamlined by generative models.
- Automated intake workflows increasingly handle sorting incoming mail and recording staff leave entitlements.
What stays human
- Discreet executive gatekeeping and handling sensitive, confidential communications with emotional intelligence.
- Navigating office politics, building trust among team members, and resolving interpersonal friction.
- Managing unpredictable physical office logistics, VIP visitor hospitality, and immediate crisis coordination.
What to learn
- Orchestrating automated workflows using tools like Power Automate to integrate software and calendar management.
- Prompting and supervising AI models for precision drafting of executive correspondence and reports.
- Upskilling in project coordination and operations management to advance beyond routine clerical tasks.
Task by task
The ILO scored every task of the occupation separately, as the average of two AI models (GPT-4o and Gemini). The pale band is the range between the two models' scores, the dot the ILO's final score (for a few tasks expert review placed it outside the band).
- Screening requests for meetings or appointments and helping to organize meetings76
- Dealing with routine correspondence on their own initiative.64
- Checking, formatting and transcribing correspondence, minutes and reports from dictation, electronic documents or written drafts to conform to office standards, using typewriter, personal computer or other word processing equipment64
- Screening and recording staff-members' leave and other entitlements56
- Using various computer software packages including spreadsheets to provide administrative support55
- Organizing and supervising filing systems55
- Scanning, recording and distributing mail, correspondence and documents52
- Dealing with incoming or outgoing mail41
How much does it affect you?
Every job is different: mark which of these tasks you do and how much, and we'll compute your own, time-weighted score.
For each task: I don't do it · sometimes · most of my job.
- Screening requests for meetings or appointments and helping to organize meetings(76)
- Dealing with routine correspondence on their own initiative.(64)
- Checking, formatting and transcribing correspondence, minutes and reports from dictation, electronic documents or written drafts to conform to office standards, using typewriter, personal computer or other word processing equipment(64)
- Screening and recording staff-members' leave and other entitlements(56)
- Using various computer software packages including spreadsheets to provide administrative support(55)
- Organizing and supervising filing systems(55)
- Scanning, recording and distributing mail, correspondence and documents(52)
- Dealing with incoming or outgoing mail(41)
You are exactly at the occupation average. (The occupation's score: 58.)
About 88% of your working time goes to highly exposed tasks (score ≥ 50).
- • Screening requests for meetings or appointments and helping to organize meetings
- • Dealing with routine correspondence on their own initiative.
- • Dealing with incoming or outgoing mail
- • Scanning, recording and distributing mail, correspondence and documents
An estimate from the ILO task scores. Everything is computed in your browser — nothing is sent or stored.
How many people work in this occupational group?
Share of the General and keyboard clerks group in total employment, by country (Eurostat, ISCO 2-digit — 4-digit breakdowns are not public by country).
Table view
| Country | General and keyboard clerks |
|---|---|
| Greece | 7.3% · 314 thousand · 2025 |
| Germany | 6.4% · 2,692 thousand · 2025 |
| Italy | 5.9% · 1,413 thousand · 2025 |
| Portugal | 5.2% · 273 thousand · 2025 |
| Switzerland | 5.1% · 245 thousand · 2025 |
| Austria | 4.4% · 200 thousand · 2025 |
| Cyprus | 4.3% · 22 thousand · 2025 |
| Malta | 3.7% · 12 thousand · 2025 |
| Slovakia | 3.7% · 96 thousand · 2025 |
| Poland | 3.6% · 617 thousand · 2025 |
| Denmark | 3.5% · 109 thousand · 2025 |
| France | 3.3% · 955 thousand · 2025 |
| Croatia | 2.9% · 49 thousand · 2025 |
| Slovenia | 2.8% · 28 thousand · 2025 |
| Belgium | 2.8% · 144 thousand · 2025 |
| Hungary | 2.8% · 131 thousand · 2025 |
| Spain | 2.3% · 521 thousand · 2025 |
| Czechia | 2.0% · 105 thousand · 2025 |
| Romania | 2.0% · 152 thousand · 2025 |
| Luxembourg | 1.9% · 6 thousand · 2025 |
| Norway | 1.8% · 52 thousand · 2025 |
| Netherlands | 1.5% · 147 thousand · 2025 |
| Bulgaria | 1.4% · 41 thousand · 2025 |
| Ireland | 1.2% · 34 thousand · 2025 |
| Finland | 1.2% · 31 thousand · 2025 |
| Latvia | 0.8% · 7 thousand · 2025 |
| Sweden | 0.8% · 43 thousand · 2025 |
| Iceland | 0.8% · 2 thousand · 2025 |
| United Kingdom | 0.7% · 238 thousand · 2025 |
| Lithuania | 0.7% · 10 thousand · 2025 |
| Estonia | 0.4% · 3 thousand · 2025 |
What do they earn?
Mean gross monthly earnings in the major occupational group (Clerical support workers). Eurostat's earnings survey only publishes pay by occupation at 1 digit, so this is the job's broader group. Enterprises with 10+ employees, 2022.
By country, at purchasing power parity (PPS/month), so countries with different price levels can be compared.
- Switzerland4,326
- Luxembourg3,358
- Denmark3,338
- Belgium3,291
- Norway3,160
- Germany2,927
- Ireland2,900
- Iceland2,825
- Austria2,768
- Netherlands2,680
- EU272,590
- Italy2,521
- Sweden2,451
- Finland2,386
- Spain2,121
- Slovenia2,111
- Malta2,089
- Lithuania2,049
- France2,018
- Croatia1,847
- Greece1,837
- Poland1,796
- Romania1,755
- Estonia1,740
- Czechia1,725
- Cyprus1,685
- Hungary1,682
- Latvia1,617
- Slovakia1,583
- Portugal1,421
- Bulgaria1,203
Source: Eurostat Structure of Earnings Survey (earn_ses22_21), every four years. The United Kingdom is not covered by the survey.
Outlook to 2035
Employment in the General and keyboard clerks group according to Cedefop's 2026 forecast.
thousand · Cedefop Skills Forecast 2026 · 2026–2035: projection
Replacement demand is the jobs left by people retiring or changing careers — even a shrinking occupation can have many openings.
According to the WEF
Administrative Assistants and Executive Secretaries — among the FASTEST-DECLINING jobs (rank 5)
Future 2035 →Sources: ILO WP140 (2025) · Eurostat lfsa_egai2d · Cedefop Skills Forecast 2026 · WEF Future of Jobs 2025 · ESCO. The exposure score measures how much of an occupation's tasks generative AI could perform — not whether the job disappears. For information only, not career advice. How do we calculate this?