Working Harder Than Ever -Feeling It Less.
What's behind the profession's growing recognition problem - and what you can actually do about it
A colleague messaged me a few months ago. She’d just come out of her annual review. Her manager had told her she was doing brilliantly. Her exec had said she was indispensable. She’d got a pay rise.
She should have felt great but she didn’t.
“I don’t know why,” she told me. “Everything looks fine on paper. But I feel less valued than I did two years ago.”
I knew exactly what she meant and I am pretty sure you do too.
The ASAP 2026 State of the Profession report found that 62.2% of administrative professionals feel valued at work - down from 67.8% the year before. An 8.3% drop in a single year. And this happened while 70% of those same professionals received a salary increase and AI adoption across the profession nearly tripled.
More money- more capability. Less recognition? That’s not a performance problem. It’s something else entirely.
The people doing this work are carrying more than ever. More scope, more responsibility, more complexity. The role has grown consistently, without anyone formally acknowledging it and the recognition, the genuine sense of being seen for what you actually do, has not kept pace.
I’ve watched this happen for years, and I went through a version of it myself. You do more. You get better. You take on more and the gap between what you’re actually contributing and how you’re being seen gets wider, not narrower. The pay rise lands. The “you’re brilliant” lands well and somehow none of it touches the thing that actually matters?
What’s happening isn’t always someone’s fault. Most executives don’t deliberately underrecognise the people they rely on. They’re busy. They assume that if things are running well, people are fine. The work that goes unnoticed is usually the work that’s done so well it becomes invisible.
But understanding why it happens doesn’t make it any easier to sit with in my opinion.
So this edition is about the gap itself. What creates it, what it costs, and - for both assistants and the leaders reading this - what actually closes it.
📌 Paid subscribers get all of this -extra:
1. Why feeling valued and being paid well are not the same thing - what the data is actually telling us about recognition in this profession, and the four factors that genuinely drive feeling valued at work. Pay is only one of them.
2. The recognition audit - a practical way to assess where your own recognition gap is and where it’s coming from. Is it your executive, the wider organisation, or how you’re describing your own work? The answer changes what you do about it.
3. How to close the gap without making it awkward - the conversations worth having, the language that works, and how to make your contribution visible in a way that feels natural rather than forced. Includes real scripts from coaching sessions.
Plus: For Leaders & EA Managers - what the 8.3% drop in feeling valued is actually telling you, and the three things that move the dial more than a pay rise.
