Selection criteria for administration officers, with examples

I have worked in the front office at Jacaranda Ridge State School, a primary school of about 650 students, for four years, and the start of each school year is when our service is most tested.

In January 2026 we had 74 new enrolments in the two weeks before Term 1. In previous years families had queued at the counter with incomplete forms while phones went unanswered, so my business manager asked me to organise enrolments in a way that kept the office running.

I set up 20-minute enrolment appointments through the school’s online booking page and emailed each family a checklist of what to bring, such as proof of age and any medical plans or court orders. A week out, I rang the 15 families who hadn’t booked. At each appointment I checked the documents against the checklist before entering the student into our student information system, so nothing had to be chased later. When a family who had recently arrived in Australia needed help, I booked a phone interpreter and went through the forms with them myself. A colleague covered the counter and phones during my appointment blocks, and we swapped every two hours so neither of us was stuck on one task all day.

All 74 enrolments were complete before the first day, compared with 19 still missing documents on day one the year before. The principal asked me to use the same process for mid-year enrolments, and several parents mentioned the booking system in our end-of-term survey.

For three years I have managed correspondence and records for the planning and building teams at Ironbark Shire Council, using the council’s electronic document and records management system every day.

In 2025 an internal audit sampled 200 development application files and found that 31% were missing correspondence, because emails and letters had been saved to staff members’ own drives instead of being registered. I was asked to close the gap before the next audit.

I started by finding out why. I sat with four planners for an hour each and found that the system’s folder structure didn’t match how they worked, so registering an email took several clicks. With the records coordinator’s approval, I set up a folder for each application under its number, agreed a short naming convention, and added quick-save shortcuts to their email. I registered the backlog myself, about 2,300 items over eight weeks, checking each against the application number and date. I ran three 30-minute training sessions for the 26 planning and building staff and wrote a one-page guide. Finally, I set up a weekly report of unregistered items so I could follow them up within days rather than at the next audit.

The follow-up audit six months later found 3% of sampled files incomplete, down from 31%, and the time the team took to answer a request for file documents fell from about a week to two days.

As the only administration officer for the 14 staff at the State Lands Agency’s Riverlands office, I handle fleet bookings, purchasing, correspondence and the office’s finance processing, so I plan my work around deadlines I don’t control.

In June 2025 my counterpart in the neighbouring office went on leave and I took on her team’s processing as well, in the same weeks as the end-of-financial-year deadlines and a ministerial visit to our region.

On the first morning I listed every task across both offices with its deadline and what would happen if it slipped. I took the list to my manager and we agreed three priorities: invoices and purchase card acquittals before the finance cut-off, briefing material for the visit, and anything a member of the public was waiting on. Routine filing and stationery orders could wait two weeks. I kept the first hour of each day for invoices, batched phone calls into two windows, and set up a shared request list so both teams could see where their requests were up to instead of emailing me. When the visit schedule changed at short notice, I rebooked the vehicles and venue that afternoon and told both managers what had moved.

All 112 invoices and acquittals for both offices were processed before the cut-off, the visit ran to schedule, and no public enquiry waited more than two working days. My manager now uses the same priority list whenever anyone in the region goes on leave.

In four years as administration officer in the people and culture team at Coral Harbour Regional Council, I have handled medical certificates, injury claims and recruitment files for 420 staff, and discretion is part of every working day.

In 2025, while filing a return-to-work plan, I noticed that the folder holding staff medical certificates and injury records could be opened by anyone in the council, not just our team. It held about 340 documents.

I didn’t open anything I didn’t need to. I told my manager within the hour and, with her approval, logged an urgent request with IT to restrict the folder to the three people who manage injury claims. While IT checked the access logs, I moved the records into the restricted area of our records system and set up a separate inbox for medical certificates, so they no longer arrived in the general team mailbox. I updated our team procedure and walked my four colleagues through it. When staff from other teams asked why a shared folder had disappeared, I told them it had moved for privacy reasons and how to send documents to us now, without saying what it had held.

Access was restricted within two hours, the logs showed no one outside the team had opened the files, and there have been no privacy complaints since. Internal audit later used our procedure as the model for two other teams that hold personal information.