Secretary

Secretary

Department: Department of Veterans Affairs

Location(s): Battle Creek, Michigan

Salary Range: $50460 - $72644 Per Year

Job Summary: The incumbent serves as the Executive Secretary and administrative assistant to the Chief of Staff for the Battle Creek VA Medical Center. Whenever necessary, the incumbent provides secretarial and administrative services to Executive Leadership.

Major Duties:

• Major duties include, but are not limited to: Exercises exclusive control over the Chief of Staff's (COS) appointments with complete authority for commitments of time. Screens all calls and visitors, answering questions, and completing business involving established policy of routine matters without making referrals to the COS, whenever possible. Exercises independent decision-making in routing and assigning actions and suspense dates on all correspondence coming to the COS office on a daily basis. Maintains a log for all action items to monitor the timely completion and submission of responses. Develops and maintains a suspense system which is reviewed at least daily to flag pending issues and ensure due dates are met.. The incumbent is required to use sound judgment and diplomacy in notifying services to determine status of delinquent items prior to official due dates. Receives and reviews all correspondence for the COS and replies to mail not requiring the COS's attention. Screens all correspondence prepared for the COS's signature for clarity, completeness of reply, grammatical, and procedural correctness. Establishes meetings at the Battle Creek VAMC as well as other sites in VISN 10. This includes creating agendas, notifying participants, and arranging support items (lunch, tours, special equipment, etc.). Attends, records, and distributes minutes of meetings. Prepares written documents, charts and graphs. Many of these documents are original forms or reports which require extensive experimentation to determine proper layout and format. Prepares travel orders and makes travel and accommodation reservations as requested by COS. Prepares travel vouchers in a timely manner after each trip has been completed and checks to ensure any reimbursement due is received. In the absence of the Secretary to the Director, the incumbent assumes the duties of those positions, as well of those of his/her own. Communicates with the COS any special requests or instructions received from higher authorities and actions to be taken as a result of inquiries. Maintains a leave schedule for the COS's direct reports and communicates on a daily basis the status of absences and coverage. Promotion Potential: The selectee may be promoted to the full performance level without further competition when all regulatory, qualification, and performance requirements are met. Selection at a lower grade level does not guarantee promotion to the full performance level. Work Schedule: Monday-Friday, 8:00am-4:30pm Telework: Ad-hoc may be authorized by supervisor, only pursuant to the needs of the facility. Position Description/PD#: Secretary/PD91376-0 and PD91377-0

Qualifications: To qualify for this position, applicants must meet all requirements by the closing date of this announcement, 05/14/2026. Time-In-Grade Requirement: Applicants who are current Federal employees and have held a GS grade any time in the past 52 weeks must also meet time-in-grade requirements by the closing date of this announcement. For a GS-07 position you must have served 52 weeks at the GS-06. For a GS-08 position you must have served 52 weeks at the GS-07. The grade may have been in any occupation, but must have been held in the Federal service. An SF-50 that shows your time-in-grade eligibility must be submitted with your application materials. If the most recent SF-50 has an effective date within the past year, it may not clearly demonstrate you possess one-year time-in-grade, as required by the announcement. In this instance, you must provide an additional SF-50 that clearly demonstrates one-year time-in-grade. Note: Time-In-Grade requirements also apply to former Federal employees applying for reinstatement as well as current employees applying for Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1998 (VEOA) appointment. SELECTIVE PLACEMENT FACTOR: This position includes a Selective Placement Factor (SPF) which is a prerequisite to appointment and represents minimum requirements for a position. Applicants who do not meet the SPF are ineligible for further consideration. The SPF for this position is: 40 Words Per Minute typing speed. You may qualify based on your experience as described below: Specialized Experience GS-07: You must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the next lower grade GS-06 in the normal line of progression for the occupation in the organization. Examples of specialized experience would typically include, but are not limited to: Maintains calendars; coordinate meetings; schedules appointments; coordinates with staff as necessary; schedules travel; obtains all required documents for analysis and reports; types dictation from meeting and files minutes. Specialized Experience GS-08: You must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the next lower grade GS-07 in the normal line of progression for the occupation in the organization. Examples of specialized experience would typically include, but are not limited to: planning and organizing work, coordinating with staff and service line management personnel; completes projects, evaluations, reports; preparing meeting minutes; works independently; prepares written documents; organizes material for executive use; maintains control of channels of communication between executive office and other professional, regulatory, and academic organizations. For more information on these qualification standards, please visit the United States Office of Personnel Management's website at https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/classification-qualifications/general-schedule-qualification-standards/.

How to Apply: Please read the entire announcement and all the instructions before you begin an application. To apply for this position, you must complete the initial online application, to include the initial online questionnaire and submission of the required documentation specified in the How to Apply and Required Documents section. The complete application package must be submitted by 11:59 PM (ET) on the closing date of the announcement to receive consideration. To preview the application questionnaire, click https://apply.usastaffing.gov/ViewQuestionnaire/12954460. The application process is as follows: To begin, click Apply Online to create a USA JOBS account or log in to your existing account. Follow the prompts to select your USA JOBS resume and/or other supporting documents. Answer the questions presented in the application and attach all necessary supporting documentation. Click the Submit Application button prior to 11:59 PM (ET) on the announcement closing date, 05/14/2026. If you are required to complete any USA Hire Assessments, you will be notified after submitting your application. The notification will be provided in your application submission screen and via email. The notification will include your unique assessment access link to the USA Hire system and the completion deadline. Additionally, in USAJOBS you can click "Track this application" to return to your assessment completion notice. Access USA Hire using your unique assessment link. Access is granted through your USAJOBS login credentials. Review all instructions prior to beginning your assessments. You will have the opportunity to request a testing accommodation before beginning the assessments should you have a disability covered under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 as amended. Set aside at least 3 hours to take the USA Hire Assessments; however, most applicants complete the assessments in less time. If you need to stop the assessments and continue later, you can re-use your unique assessment link. NOTE: Your responses to the USA Hire Assessments will be reused for one year (in most cases) from the date you complete an assessment. If future applications you submit require completion of the same assessments, your responses will be automatically reused. Visit the USA Hire Applicant Resource Center for practice assessments and assessment preparation resources at https://support-usahire.opm.gov/hc/en-us. To update your application, including supporting documentation: During the announcement open period, return to your USAJOBS account, find your application record, and click Edit my application. This option will no longer be available once the announcement has closed. To view the announcement status or your application status: https://help.usajobs.gov/how-to. Your application status page is where you can view your application status, USA Hire assessment completion status, and review your notifications sent by the hiring agency regarding your application. Beginning September 27, 2025, Federal agencies will only accept resumes up to two pages in length to comply with the Merit Hiring Plan. Resumes longer than two pages will result in ineligibility for further consideration for the position. USAJOBS will not allow you to upload or build resumes longer than two pages, and you will need to update the resumes in your profile before applying for a job. Resumes should include information relevant to the knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies of the position to which you are applying. VA is unable to make assumptions about qualifications if not clearly listed. Resumes must be legible so they can be reviewed for eligibility, minimum qualifications and other position requirements listed in the job announcement. Your resume must be 5MB or less. We recommend saving and uploading your resume as a PDF to maintain formatting and number of pages. We also accept GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, RTF, TXT, PDF, ODT or Word (DOC or DOCX). We do not accept PDF portfolio files. We recommend using a sans-serif font size like Lato, if available. Other widely available options are Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Open San Source Sans Pro, Roboto or Noro Sans. Make your page margins 0.5 inches. Consider using 14-point size font for titles and 10-point for the main text in your resume. The resume builder can help you create a resume using these recommendations and uses the information in your USAJOBS profile to help you get started. Helpful Hints for Creating a Two-Page Resume: Prioritize most relevant and recent experience Use concise, results focused language Align language from the job announcement Focus on demonstrating skills and competencies Remove outdated or unrelated experience Use the USAJOBS resume builder Additional guidance on this new requirement and resume building tools can be found at https://help.usajobs.gov/faq/application/documents/resume/page-limit

Application Deadline: 2026-05-14