Q.What academic and professional qualifications are required to become a good secretary?

Beyond character, a secretary needs specific education and, for some types of office, a recognised professional qualification.

General academic qualifications

Every secretary benefits from a sound general education with a strong command of language, spoken and written, since drafting correspondence, notices, agendas and minutes forms the core of the job across every type of office.

Office and secretarial procedure skills

A good secretary needs working knowledge of filing, indexing, and correspondence handling, and, traditionally, shorthand and typewriting; today this translates into competence with word-processing, spreadsheets, and email or other communication software.

Basic accounts knowledge

Most secretarial posts touch financial record-keeping at some point — from a club's treasurer-cum-secretary role to a company secretary certifying financial filings — so familiarity with basic accounts and office financial records is a valuable qualification across types.

Professional qualification for a company secretary

For the office of company secretary specifically, the Companies Act, 2013 (Section 2(24)) and the Company Secretaries Act, 1980 require formal membership of the Institute of Company Secretaries of India, obtained through ICSI's own Foundation, Executive and Professional level examinations along with mandatory practical training — a distinct professional qualification, not merely a general degree.

Qualifications for government and co-operative secretaries …

A frequent gap is treating 'qualifications' as identical for every type of secretary and missing that only the company secretary has a compulsory statutory profe …