Life of an EA- An interview with Jacqueline Smith

I had the wonderful opportunity of conducting this informational interview with Jacqueline Smith, an operations manager at Crown Attorneys’ office. She has also worked as an office administrator at the Attorney general in Guelph. She started her career path as an accountant in a hospital in New Brunswick. She has 35 years of professional experience in public prosecution. Believe me when I say that her life has been extremely fascinating and inspiring regarding her lifelong professional experience. She has been an EA to an Executive Assistant in charge of the highway traffic unit. While working there, she was also assisting other inspectors at the precinct. She has lived and worked in public prosecution for over 15 years in New Brunswick. During our interview, she mentioned various volunteer work she had done over the past years. Jacqueline has always been active in volunteer work and says that it helped her develop as a person throughout her professional career.

She started working for the union as a steward and became the president after some time. She worked for the union for almost 7 years. she described that maneuvering the work contracts for people at the union helped her management style, and later on she started working for Crown’s Attorney. She mentioned that she likes to work in a dynamic environment and has always been a leader. She stated that Covid-19 helped her stepping up her game at the workplace by challenging her work aspects. She put light on her daily roles and duties at her workplace. The interesting part is she has dealt with everything in her office. She mentioned that there is no corner she hasn’t explored in her office. Anything in the office that cannot be dealt with is given to her and she solves the issue efficiently. She also works deals with the finances of the office. We got to a conversation where she mentioned an example of her work life that sometimes she has to deal with people at her door and simultaneously on her phone and at her computer, all at once and she never loses her cool. She tackles all of them with a calm mind and tries to find a solution for every problem.

As an aspiring EA, she recommended connecting with more people to increase your network. She also recommended writing a blog about the challenges and trends of the current market situation. She suggested, to be honest, and describe your student and professional life to connect with other people sympathetically. Being an international student, she suggested us to improve our grammatical and communication skills, read books and go out there in the world and explore the diversity among different people.

We discussed the challenges she has been facing in her profession during this pandemic and she stated that the biggest challenge has been the mental health of her co-workers. She brought up that everybody is stuck in meetings or training and no one really has a routine to take care of themselves or socially interact with other people. Due to Covid-19, a 6-week rotation method has been applied in her office where two workers will rotate and come to the office after 6 weeks. This has created challenges for employees to keep up with the changes happening at their workplace. This has affected the mental health of the majority of her coworkers which is one of the current challenges for her.

In a nutshell, she is a great employee in her profession and also a wonderful human being. She was concerned for students’ current job availability as well and was keen on trying to find a solution for it which made me really happy being a student myself. She advises all aspiring EAs to always connect with other people and learn how they operate in their workplaces. Always reach out to people to get help in times of need and also help others.