Case studies: Company secretarial assistant: Ben

Ben studied law and politics and the University of Nottingham and graduated in 2002. He is now a company secretarial assistant for ITV plc in London.

I realised when doing my law degree that I didn't want to go down the route of competing for a training contract and becoming a lawyer. I wanted a job that built on my legal skills, but was more 'commercial' and portable - I didn't want to specialise or be tied to one industry. I found out about the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators (ICSA)  qualification on the university milkround and it appealed straight away - it was a broad qualification, would build on my legal skills and allow me to work in any industry. My first graduate role was with an oil and gas company, and now I work in media, so it's definitely a portable qualification.

In my current role, I'm based within a small team at ITV's head office. I'm responsible for a wide range of areas including corporate governance, board support, employee share schemes, data protection, intellectual property (trademarks and domain names) and administration of the group's 300+ subsidiary companies - mainly in the UK but also Australia, Germany and the USA. My job is to support the department in all of these areas, managing routine compliance, such as appointing directors, attending meetings to take minutes, drafting annual reports and shareholder communication, processing share option exercises, making stock exchange announcements and managing the domain name portfolio - and taking on other project work as necessary.

The main thing I really enjoy about my job is that I work in a service-oriented department and our aim is to provide the best possible support to the business. This means that we're always looking for better ways to do things. I also enjoy building relationships with (and getting exposure to) lots of different parts of the company - you can deal with all levels of the organisation in one day, from the Chairman to a programme maker on set in Costa Rica.

I think the key skills needed for this work are strong organisational skills, an ability to prioritise workloads, being comfortable dealing with individuals in senior positions and building relationships, as well as attention to detail. 

I studied for the ICSA qualification and have completed a year of mandatory CPD through the Institute. I've also taken a lot of training courses offered by ICSA related to the Companies Act and corporate governance, as well as seminars on corporate reporting, share schemes and corporate social responsibility.

My advice to anyone thinking of pursuing this career is to try and get some work experience in a secretariat department. You've got nothing to lose by writing in and asking - it's really useful to get experience of the role day to day and to see how it fits into the business. Then you'll know if it appeals to you.