Gifts for Administrative Professionals Day

katia | 5:26 pm | April 4, 2008 | Contest, Admin Professionals, Admin Professionals Day, Admin Professionals Week, Administrative Professionals, TheGift.com

Administrative Professionals Day and Week is fast approaching and will fall on the April 21-25 and April 23rd, respectively. Nowadays, we don’t hear much about this special date, which is unfortunate, and because of that I decided to celebrate it by writing about it. It’s always important to recognize any profession as it makes us, the professionals, feel very good about ourselves and proud of our work.

So, I went online and did a search on “administrative professionals day” and found a couple of interesting things/sites I’d like to share with you. The International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP) offers an array of resources for admin professionals from valuable educational and research opportunity to office supplies to their OfficePro Magazine. Right on the website there was also a brief history of the administrative professionals day, of which I’m pasting a little excerpt below.

“This annual event was originally organized in 1952 as “National Secretaries Week” by the National Secretaries Association (now known as the International Association of Administrative Professionals) in conjunction with public relations executive Harry Klemfuss and a consortium of office product manufacturers. It was established as an effort to recognize secretaries for their contributions in the workplace, and to attract people to secretarial/administrative careers. In the year 2000, IAAP announced a name change for Professional Secretaries Week and Professional Secretaries Day. The names were changed to Administrative Professionals Week and Administrative Professionals Day to keep pace with changing job titles and expanding responsibilities of today’s administrative workforce.

Over the years, Administrative Professionals Week has become one of the largest workplace observances. The event is celebrated worldwide, bringing together millions of people for community events, educational seminars, and individual corporate activities recognizing support staff with gifts of appreciation.”

After reading this I decided to search for gifts for these professionals, just out of curiosity to see what was popular out there. I found gifts for almost every taste, I would say, from office supplies, office decor to gift and fruit basket to flowers. I also found this cool article titled “The Top 5 Gifts to Give on Administrative Professionals Day” from Monster Career Advice listing the top 5 gifts to give, which are:

1. A day off with pay
2. A gift certificate to a restaurant, hotel or play
3. A bonus or raise
4. Career development seminars or training
5. A SPA massage

As we can see, none of the gifts I found online are listed here, BUT it doesn’t mean they won’t be appreciated. Except for gifts # 2 and 5, all the others listed above are a matter of internal policies. I happened to find that office décor is a great gift. Who wouldn’t want a little cute paper weight, or maybe a nice silver set of pen, stapler and clip holder? I would. In fact, office décor is what I asked for on my last secret Santa. So, here are few ideas:Office décor gifts, such as tabletop dish gardens, “Pimp My Cubicle” toys, frames and more.Office/desk flowers, where you will find beautiful arrangements to add color to your or your colleagues’ desk.THE MOST EXCITING result I found was on a sweepstakes for Admin Professionals Day. This is good for you to show your bosses (or managers) so they can enter you to win 1 flower arrangement for 12 months from 1-800-FLOWERS.COM! I thought that this is such a cute idea! So, go ahead and check this out and show it to our boss!Good luck and Happy Administrative Professionals Day!