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Alicia Fairclough’s work with CEOs and thousands of salary respondents reveals what organisations miss when they treat executive support as administration.
A 2026 US salary survey of 2,560 Executive Assistants found an average base salary of $95,990, while the top 5% averaged $211,963 in total compensation and the bottom 5% averaged $41,458. The spread points to a problem larger than pay. One title can conceal radically different levels of responsibility, influence and complexity. Alicia Fairclough has spent years inside CEO offices and now studies the profession from the founder’s side. As she puts it, “Executive Assistant” can describe vastly different levels of responsibility, influence and complexity.
Alicia Fairclough, Founder of EA How To in London, holds a Bachelor of Teaching / Bachelor of Arts from the University of Newcastle.
Invisible Work Is Why Executive Assistant Capability Gets Misread
Fairclough’s central argument begins with a distinction many organisations miss: executive support is not primarily a transaction between a leader and someone completing tasks. The valuable work happens in the judgement around those tasks. An EA has to anticipate consequences, weigh priorities, protect confidentiality and understand what an executive needs. From the CEO office, Fairclough saw the cost of getting that judgement wrong.
That perspective changed when she became a business owner with an Executive Assistant of her own. The experience gave her a second vantage point on delegation, trust and capacity. “My training is grounded not in an idealised version of the role, but in what both EAs and executives actually need from the partnership.” The distinction matters because good executive support often makes problems invisible. Fairclough describes a role in which pressure is absorbed, complexity is managed and problems are prevented before they become visible to the organisation. “When the role is performed well, problems are prevented, pressure is absorbed and complexity is quietly managed.”
That invisibility is part of why Fairclough believes the profession has been poorly understood. An EA can operate close to the most senior decision makers while lacking a peer group, a clear career path or a manager whose own experience is developing EAs. The work can be reduced to administration because the consequential work disappears when it succeeds. Her years supporting different CEOs gave her a view from inside that gap. Her experience included CEO-level EA roles before she moved into building a platform focused specifically on the profession.
She founded EA How To in July 2019 and initially built it alongside her full-time role. Leaving the security of her corporate career eventually allowed her to concentrate on the venture full-time. The business has since developed into a global community, while Fairclough has continued to work at the intersection of training, professional support and executive expectations.
The Administrative Professionals Salary Report became another way to examine the gap at scale. Fairclough and Yvette Lamb began with a simple question about what the average EA earns, then built and distributed the survey and cleaned, analysed and interpreted the responses. The report is produced annually across the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Its 2026 US edition gave the profession a more complicated picture than the job title suggests: among 2,560 respondents, average base salary was $95,990, while average total compensation for the top 5% was $211,963, compared with $41,458 for the bottom 5%. The finding does not establish a single definition of an EA. It shows the opposite. Under the same broad title sit roles with very different levels of responsibility and complexity.
The report surfaces a finding that complicates how leaders should read professional development. In the 2026 US edition, regular AI users earned 31.6% more on average than respondents who did not use AI and were not interested in doing so. Fairclough explicitly treats that figure as an association, not evidence that AI use causes higher pay. The finding is another indication that the profession contains meaningful differences that a job title alone cannot explain.
That is consistent with why Fairclough did not approach EA development as a generic catalogue of administrative skills. Her starting point was the lived reality of the CEO office: decisions arrive without perfect information, priorities collide, sensitive matters cannot be handled by formula, and the executive relationship depends on trust. The report adds a second lens: comparable data can reveal how differently the market values roles carrying the same broad label. Together, the evidence challenges a narrow definition of executive support without reducing the argument to a training pitch.
Executive Support Starts With Judgement, Relationships, and Consequence
For senior leaders, the practical lesson is to stop evaluating executive support through the narrowest visible measure: whether tasks were completed. Fairclough’s experience points to a different operating test, one that can be applied inside an organisation without turning the EA role into a generic administrative function.
- Evaluate judgement before volume. When reviewing an EA’s performance, examine the decisions surrounding the work, not only the number of tasks completed. Ask what was anticipated, what risk was avoided, which competing priorities were resolved and where the executive’s time was protected. This follows Fairclough’s distinction between efficient task completion and the judgement required to help an executive operate effectively.
- Make invisible work discussable. A smooth calendar, a prevented problem or a confidential issue handled quietly can leave no obvious record of the capability involved. Senior leaders can build regular conversations around what the role is absorbing and preventing. That gives the work a language beyond administration and makes development needs easier to identify.
- Treat relationships as part of the operating infrastructure. Fairclough learned this during a serious legal matter involving her company and a much larger organisation. Formal letters from the legal team, messages from senior leaders and corporate connections had failed to reach the person who could move the matter forward. A relationship she had built with an EA at the other organisation produced an introduction to someone who could help, on the same day she asked. The lesson is not that informal contacts replace formal channels. It is that an EA’s network can extend an executive’s ability to navigate an organisation.
- Give the role a peer network. Fairclough’s experience showed her why an EA can be positioned at the highest levels of a company without having colleagues who understand the role. Leaders can create access to peer learning, external professional communities and structured development rather than assuming an EA will work everything out alone.
- Separate the role from the title when setting expectations. A senior leader can compare an EA’s actual scope with the formal job description and identify where responsibility has expanded. Compensation, access, confidentiality, decision support and relationship management may all indicate a role operating at a different level from its label. The Salary Report’s variation gives leaders a reason to examine that mismatch rather than assume the title tells the whole story.
- Use the executive relationship as a two-way test. Fairclough’s experience on both sides of the delegation relationship suggests that leaders should ask not only whether an EA understands the executive, but whether the executive has made priorities, trust and expectations clear enough for sound judgement.
The practical test is simple: if executive support is being assessed only by what appeared on a task list, part of the job is missing. Fairclough’s conclusion is sharper: “Influence does not always follow the organisational chart, and an EA’s relationships can become critical business infrastructure.”
Who Is Alicia Fairclough?
Alicia Fairclough is the London-based Founder of EA How To, a global learning community for Executive Assistants, and holds a Bachelor of Teaching / Bachelor of Arts from the University of Newcastle.
Her career did not begin in the CEO office. Fairclough spent years across customer-facing, travel and assistant roles before moving into senior executive support. Her experience included work as an Executive Assistant to CEOs in technology companies, giving her direct exposure to the pace, confidentiality, competing priorities and ambiguity that shape the role at senior levels. That experience became the foundation for the argument behind EA How To: organisations can see the smooth outcome without seeing the judgement and relationship management required to produce it.
Fairclough founded EA How To in July 2019. She initially developed it alongside her full-time employment, then left the security of her corporate career to focus on it completely. Her stated purpose was straightforward: “I founded EA How To in July 2019 with a simple mission: to improve the working lives of Executive Assistants.” The venture has since grown into a community that reaches more than 130,000 Executive Assistants worldwide across its platforms, with particularly strong communities in the US, UK, Australia and Canada.
The Administrative Professionals Salary Report, created with Yvette Lamb, extends that work into data. The annual report covers the US, UK, Canada and Australia and examines compensation across the profession. Its 2026 US edition included 2,560 respondents, producing a wide spread in compensation and underscoring the limits of the job title as a measure of responsibility.
Fairclough’s career now connects three positions that are rarely held together: former EA, executive with an EA of her own, and founder studying the profession from outside the individual CEO office. Running a business with an EA means delegation and trust are no longer abstract ideas borrowed from the CEO offices she once supported. They are part of her own operating experience. That combination gives her argument commercial relevance for senior leaders: executive support is not simply the order visible on a calendar or task list, but the judgement and relationships underneath it.
Alicia Fairclough is the London-based founder of EA How To, a global learning community for Executive Assistants, and holds a Bachelor of Teaching / Bachelor of Arts from the University of Newcastle. To connect with Alicia or learn more, visit EA How To or her LinkedIn profile.
