Why Admin Staff Are Invisible in Most Employee Development Programmes

Ask any HR manager to name their top performers and they will rattle off a list without hesitation. The sales team that hit 140% of target. The operations lead who turned around a struggling department. The graduate trainee everyone is excited about.

Ask them about the person who manages the diaries, coordinates the travel, handles the correspondence, and quietly makes sure everything runs on time. The pause before the answer tells you everything.

Admin staff are not invisible because they lack talent. They are invisible because the systems around them were never designed with them in mind.

The Development Gap Nobody Talks About

Employee development programmes in most organisations follow a familiar logic. Invest in the people most likely to generate a return. That means sales, leadership, graduate schemes, and high potential lists. It means the people who are already visible, already sponsored, already in the room where decisions get made.

Administrative professionals sit outside that logic. Their contribution is essential but hard to quantify. Their impact is felt everywhere but credited nowhere. And when the development budget is allocated, they are rarely on the list.

This is not a minor oversight. In the United States alone there are 3.4 million administrative professionals. In the UK, admin and secretarial roles account for millions more. These are not niche roles. They are the connective tissue of every organisation. And they are being systematically left out of the development conversation.

What This Costs Organisations

The cost of this invisibility shows up in three places.

The first is retention. People who feel overlooked leave. Not always immediately and not always loudly. But the slow drift of disengagement is well documented, and admin staff who receive no development, no investment, no signal that they matter beyond their daily function, disengage faster than most.

The second is performance. Development is not just about promotion. It is about confidence, clarity, and the ability to bring your best thinking to a role. An admin professional who has never been given tools to reflect, grow, or understand their own direction will plateau. Not because they cannot go further, but because nobody showed them the way.

The third is culture. When an organisation invests in some people and not others, everyone notices. The admin team sees who gets sent on courses, who gets coaching, who gets the lunch with the director. The message it sends is not subtle. And it shapes how people feel about the place they spend most of their waking hours.

Why Formal Programmes Are Not the Answer

The instinct when reading this is to reach for a solution that looks like the problem. If admin staff are missing from development programmes, put them in one. Create a module. Add them to the roster. Tick the box.

The problem with that approach is that it treats admin professionals as an afterthought to a system that was never built for them. A module designed for leadership development, adapted for an administrator, is still a module designed for someone else.

What admin staff need is not a watered-down version of what managers get. They need something built for where they actually are. Something that meets them at the beginning of the journey rather than assuming they are already halfway along it.

The Starting Point That Changes Everything

The most powerful thing a business can do for an admin professional is give them a starting point. Not a programme. Not a course. A starting point.

Something that says your growth matters. Something that gives them the tools to think clearly about their direction, reflect honestly on where they are, and begin to build the kind of self-awareness that makes every other form of development more effective.

That is what the Ten Mentors Box was built to do. It is not a mentoring programme. It is what comes before one. A book, a journal, and music created specifically to help someone begin their growth journey, regardless of their role or seniority.

For the administrator who has managed everyone else’s career for years while her own stood still, this is the first time anyone has handed her something and said this is for you.

That moment matters more than any formal programme ever could.

A Practical Step for HR Managers

If you manage or influence development budgets, do one thing. Look at your current programme and ask honestly who is not on it. Not who should be added to the leadership track. Who is not on any track at all.

That is where you start. Not with a new programme, but with a simple act of acknowledgement. Your admin team keeps your organisation running. Give them a starting point for their own growth. The return, in loyalty, performance, and culture, will be worth far more than the investment.

Ready to give your admin team a starting point? Get the Ten Mentors Box or get in touch about bulk orders.

Caoimhe Duggan is the founder of Ten Mentors and spent nearly 20 years leading operations across companies in Europe, Asia, and beyond. She served as Head of Operations Asia at Spencer Ogden, where she helped scale the business internationally and it was inside fast-growing companies like this that she watched the same pattern emerge everywhere: mentorship and guidance flowed to the most visible people, while the majority were left to figure things out alone.
Her career began early in workflow automation for law firms and eventually RDJ, where she was already building systems that helped people work better. She later became certified in Learning and Development through Stada in Singapore bringing a formal grounding in how people actually grow, learn, and change to everything she builds at Ten Mentors. That combination of operational scale, systems thinking, and human development became the foundation for Ten Mentors. A practical starting point for the people the traditional mentorship system leaves behind.
Beyond the box, Caoimhe hosts the Ten Mentors Podcast — short, honest conversations designed to close the guidance gap one lesson at a time. She is also the founder of mentoring music — a new category of music she created through Ten Mentors Music. The first platform of its kind, mentoring music uses human-written lyrics built around real mentoring themes, produced through modern AI tools — something Ten Mentors is open about. Music designed to help people think clearer, stay steady, and keep moving when things get hard.
Caoimhe writes about personal growth, mentoring, leadership, and what it actually takes to move forward without a map. She has travelled to over 120 countries, lost two brothers at a young age, and brings the kind of honesty to her writing that only comes from having actually lived through difficult things.
She is based between Ireland and Sweden. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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