Free Advice

Today’s PA training courses are about more than great training, taking your money and then never communicating with you again. That’s why people who’ve been on our courses tend to come back for more as their needs change and their careers advance. In fact, much of our new business comes from previous course attendees networking with peers and spreading the word.

As well as running the Today’s PA network, linking together everyone who’s attended one of ours courses in a powerful mutual-support network, our parent company, Indiquo Ltd, is becoming more and more involved in disseminating its accumulated wisdom through other avenues. This year our MD, Paul Pennant, made his debut as the first-ever ‘Agony Uncle’ on the renowned DeskDemon website - www.deskdemon.com. DeskDemon visitors can submit their office life problems to Paul and he will provide expert free advice. The page is updated regularly with new questions and answers, so be sure to bookmark it.

On the popular PA Assist website - www.pa-assist.com you will find articles by Paul Pennant, such his guide to perfect minute writing, and regular competitions – the last one featured a beautiful Tiffany pen and glass paperweight as prizes – the perfect desk adornment for the stylish, go-ahead PA.

Paul’s always interested to hear from anyone with suggestions that make office life easier, such as his tip about managing event invitations using Microsoft Outlook: your boss has asked you to invite 1,000 people to the Christmas party - how are you going to do it? Easy: enable Outlook’s voting buttons in the invitation email, creating separate folders for ‘Accept’ and ‘Decline’ replies and setting up rules to divert the responses into the right folders. Autoreplies can also be set up so ‘Accept’ replies are sent an email with venue, map and timing details, while ‘Decline’ replies are sent a simple ‘Thankyou’. The beauty of this is, that once it is set up - which really is easy to do - you won’t have to lift a finger. Sounds great, doesn’t it – and just think how much time it can save you?

If you have a suggestion, why not submit it here and you will automatically be entered into our own monthly competition, in which there are great prizes to be won?