nicolecunningham.ch

So I moved to Zurich for a job. I don’t have that job any more. I’m still here, though. I have an apartment in Zurich and my center of interests has shifted to this part of Switzerland, so I’m not ready to hightail it back to Lausanne permanently because of one job that didn’t work out. Unless, of course, my dream job was in Lausanne.

What is my profile?

I’m a legal assistant with a strong background in accounting. I’m lucky that I have worked in a lot of different fields of the law for players at all levels. I’ve worked the longest in litigation and intellectual property, I’ve spent some time in-house and in firms, I’ve dabbled in contract management and Regulatory Affairs, I’ve been the only legal person in an otherwise non-legal department. So I can do the classic stuff- drafting, proofing, word processing, case research, tracking contracts through their lifecycles, chasing signatures, you get the deal. The time I have spent in-house has also given me time in accounting, mainly Treasury but also AR. I can use Movex and SAP.

Speaking of contracts, I am awesome at that. I make sure they are compliant, I make sure the right person is signing them, I make sure they get paid (royalties, milestones), I make sure they don’t expire (or they do, if that is what you want).

My computer skills are really quite good and exceed the basic requirements. I can rock your world at anything Office, and in fact have trained other legal secretaries in Word. I also worked as Tier I helpdesk for over a year. Do you need something typed fast? I type around 100 words a minute on a bad day, with peaks at 150, and have been reading lawyer scribble and taking Dictaphone for ten years.

Don’t let my very cute American accent fool you, my French is beyond business fluent both in written and spoken- please see my blog posts in French. Sadly, my German is basic. I can answer phones, sort mail and read letters but can’t promise more than that up front even though it is improving. I can sing along to Mani Matter songs if that counts for anything.

As mentioned above, I have a decent background in accounting for someone who is not in the accounting field. This could come in handy in a senior assistant position or in a small office where people where a lot of hats. I could run the accounting for a startup, for example.

Finally, I have done my time as a jack-of-all trades assistant for senior management. I can make coffee and do expense reports and filing and all that good stuff. But more on that below.

As you can tell from this blog and Twitter, I love social media. If you follow me on Twitter, you would also know I love the law. Where my personal and professional lives intersect is that I love the possibilities the web and social media give rise to in intellectual property. I can yap on ad nauseum about domain names, copyrights and who owns your twitpics.

What do I want to be when I grow up?

I would love to work as an administrative assistant or office manager with a strong legal and/or social media manager or community manager component in a small-ish company or startup. I can handle the accounting and contracts of a smaller structure singlehandedly, and my office skills can take pressure off a small team- I can be the little mouse that takes care of the details while the rest of the team are doing their “real jobs.” While I haven’t yet had a position as a social media manager, I am the official social media manager of my cat, who was recently on television and who has a very high Klout score for someone who sleeps 18 hours a day. The skills are there. For the moment, my dream would be to stay in Zurich. Come March or April, I will have moved my affairs around enough to envision moving back to Lausanne permanently. I have the ability to be in Romandie during the week immediately, however.

So why don’t I have the Zurich job any more?

The short version is that it was a brand new position whose requirements could only be tweaked once all the players were in place, and the day-to-day reality of the position turned out to be not what I was recruited for, and not the best fit for anyone once all the puzzle pieces in the team came together.

It was a great learning experience, though. It taught me that I do not want to do “just” an admin job at this point in my career. I don’t mind- and welcome doing -anything that needs doing to make an office run more smoothly, but I don’t want a job where all I do all day is order taxis for people. I love helping out, making coffee, printing booklets and booking flights and so on, but the opportunity to use my extra skills is very important to me personally and professionally. I would be very sad to be again in the situation where a legal component was promised to me but I just wound up making copies and ordering taxis and doing nothing else. I love being the glue that holds an office together, but it is a fine line between doing the work nobody can do and doing the work nobody else wants to do.