Administative Professionals Day greeting cards

While most holidays are geared toward amateur celebrations, there’s one that’s clearly much more professional: Administrative Professionals’ Day! The holiday celebrates everyone in the workplace who contributes to the general administration of office tasks, and conducts themself professionally. It is scheduled every year to fall on the Wednesday of the last full week of April, a formula whose calculation is complicated enough to occasionally require the help of an administrative professional. This scheduling exists to allow each Administrative Professionals’ Day to happen during the work week, though scheduling it two days earlier would have also helped to alleviate various cases of “the Mondays”. With a long and rich tradition of office merriment and thoroughly justified recognition of hard working staff members, Administrative Professionals’ Day is a holiday for every professional to administer some good times.

Administrative Professionals’ Day traces back to 1952; it was originally founded as “Secretaries’ Day”, which also included an entire Secretaries’ Week happening simultaneously. Initially it was held in June but three years later the date was moved up to April and the surrounding Secretaries’ Week was dropped. In 2000, the decision was made to change the title to “Administrative Professionals’ Day to encompass a broader range of job descriptions, and because “Secretaries’ Day” was a little too evocative of the Mad Men era. Today the holiday is observed around the world and is administered, as it were, by the aptly named International Association of Administrative Professionals. The day is typically celebrated with light-hearted or funny cards and small gifts; among the most popular are coffee mugs inscribed with cheesy sayings like “World’s Greatest Administrative Professional.”