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Editorial and Research Assistants: Job Description, Education, Skills and Duties, Earnings and Outlook

Submitted by: paula

Job Overview Publishers, publication companies and corporations, and individual writers and researchers need a staff for some clerical and editing assistance. They hire editorial and research assistants to perform a wide range of functions to provide support to their team and their projects. Editorial and research assistants ensure that the texts being provided by the writers are accurate, and suitable in terms of the content, the format, the style for the intended readers. They may work for magazines, newspapers, newlestters and many types of corporations and advertising agencies, as well as on television stations, radio stations and different Internet sites.


Education, Knowledge and Trainings Required

If you wish to build a career in becoming an editorial assistant or a research assistant, prepare as early as highschool by taking subjects in Research, English, Communications and Writing. These subjects will help you build a solid background in research, writing and editing. It is preferred that editorial and research assistants have a college degree in Journalism, Liberal Arts or in English.

Skills and Abilities

Editorial and Research assistants should be fanatic for the written word as they will be dealing with writing and reading different kinds of written outputs. They must be detailed oriented and should have a good command in grammar and the use of the language. They should be patient and should love reading and fact finding. Skills in problem solving and organization are needed in fulfilling the tasks as the second hand of the writers.


Duties

Editorial and research assistants are usually hired by several kinds of publishers, publications and corporations. Their task is to assist the editors with their respective writing tasks so that they can provide them with a clearly and accurately written reading material. Both the reseach assistant and the editorial assitant positions are entry level positions. What is good about this is that while being an assistant, opportunities for learning are huge and that the opportunities for promotion and advancement are readily available. As assistants, they may be assigned to provide support to a writer, an editor or even to an editorial team or to the whole department.

It includes working on several projects simultaneously or working on one project at a time. They help these professionals by doing fact checking and proofreading and ensuring that the texts are appropriate for the publication.  They may handle clerical aspects of project as well. 

Earnings and Job Outlook

The salary for a research assistant and editorial assistant ranges from 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. dollars per annum. Other who work for the larger companies and those with freelance projects may be compensated a minimum of 40,000 U.S. dollars yearly. However, the job opportunities and employment outlook for this field is expected to move more slowly than the average until the year of 2014.

Paula Hiz is a researcher and a human resource specialist who helps newly graduates, job applicants and post graduate professionals be aware of their job opportunities and available trainings for skills and practice upgrading.


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Word Count: 503 Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2011 Time: 6:14 AM


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