How to get out of ‘glorified admin’ jobs

[Jobseeker0]

Excuse my ignorance, even with exhausting free resources online I still struggle to escape low paid admin roles. I should mention I have autism so apologies I’m slower to understand unwritten rules/etiquette.

In another thread I complained about low salary for a job ad. Some mentioned it was glorified admin which got me thinking… how do I prevent getting stuck in these types of roles?

Graduated 2021, did a placement year too. Carried on working part time in final year with this company as thought any experience will strengthen my CV.

I applied for grad schemes like everyone else but didn’t get one. Tbh not surprised as others were much more impressive at the assessment centres. According to my careers advisor at the time only a small % of graduates get those desirable grad schemes anyway.

I instead got a ‘graduate’ job straight out of uni, but now I highly suspect all of my roles have been glorified admin. They’ve misleadingly not had admin in the job title or ad though

& I could be completely wrong here but I wonder if it maybe depends on the company/industry too?

For eg I have a few friends who had no ‘grad’ /industry exp but had customer service experience. They landed junior ‘customer success’ or ‘talent executive’ roles in tech start ups which tend to inflate job titles more. The actual requirements seem similar soft skills but it’s definitely not glorified admin, it’s a solid career path that can be quite lucrative.

I interviewed for two of those SaaS tech type companies and both had inflated job titles (one was QA analyst, one was Technical Specialist) but the actual requirements matched my glorified admin background.

According to chatgpt (yes I know not most reliable source) my existing experience is very similar to what a Release Coordinator, QA Lead, Project Delivery Coordinator does.
When I look up those types of jobs the job ad is too specialised, highly skilled for me though

How do I get the experience to leave glorified admin
I’d be happy to do voluntary work but from what I’ve seen it tends to be for more soft skills rather than teaching the specialised hatd skills

It depends on the job & company but in my experience you have two main options really

1. Take the skills/examples you have from the jobs you’ve done and apply to positions a bit up from that by making it work for you. This depends on the job advert, obviously if it says you must have X Y Z and you don’t have those things then you won’t get it but if it is more broad competencies like “ownership and accountability” you can almost always shoe horn an experience you have into this, it doesn’t have to be an exact match for the company/role you’re applying for, it’s a skill that transfers. For example the person I recently hired for a management role 60k a year has never worked in the industry and has little knowledge of the work, but has been in the army for 10 years in various roles and had the best competencies of any applicant, even those with direct experience in the same industry. He can learn the specifics of the company with us, his other skills are what sold him the job.

2. If you can’t think of any examples that you could stretch for point 1, then you ask for opportunities to work out of grade to get that experience, so “working up” within your role. Either this gives you the experiences to do point 1 or you impress your current company by stepping up and get a promotion that way.