Executive assistant training courses in the UK: the complete guide

There is no single best executive assistant training course in the UK, because the right one depends on where you are in the role. If you are newer to the role and want a recognised certificate, a regulated Level 3 qualification such as Your Excellency’s Essential PA Programme is the sensible first step. If you are experienced and the gap is strategic, a small-group, in-person day built around your own executive’s work, such as our Strategy Training Day or the University of Salford’s two-day course, will move you further than another online module. If you want AI skills, choose a day that runs on the tools your employer allows, and if the pull is towards a chief of staff role, you need a programme that is honest about what that job involves.

This guide sets out every type of executive assistant training course available in the UK in 2026, what each one costs and how to choose between them. It also covers how to learn the AI tools your organisation already pays for, what separates a senior EA from a chief of staff, and what EAs, PAs and EA Managers are paid. Where we name another provider, it is because they do a particular job well and we think you should know about them.

Executive assistant training in the UK comes in six forms: regulated qualifications, university short courses, in-person training days, AI and tools training, chief of staff training, and coaching or membership. The first decision is which of them fits what you need right now, and the table below lists the main UK providers under each type with format, price and recognition, so you can compare like with like.

• University short courses suit assistants who want a structured step into strategic work with an academic name behind it.
• AI and tools training is for learning to use Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini on your own inbox, diary and briefings.
• Chief of staff training tests whether that route is right for you and prepares you for it.
• Coaching or membership gives you ongoing development and a peer group that outlasts a course.

A regulated qualification is the one most people mean when they ask for executive assistant qualifications in the UK. It sits on the Ofqual register, it takes months, not days, and it suits assistants in the first few years of the role or those who need a formal certificate for an employer. Experienced EAs rarely need one, and in Lily’s experience as a recruiter, employers hiring senior assistants weight the last three roles far more heavily than a certificate.

The in-person training day is where most experienced EAs and PAs get the biggest change for the least time away from the desk, provided the day is built around real executive work rather than generic office skills. A good way to judge any provider is to ask what you will take back to your desk, whether that is a way of prioritising, a briefing format or a set of AI prompts written for your own executive.

Two routes the table leaves out. For assistants early in their career, the Level 3 Business Administrator apprenticeship can be funded through the apprenticeship levy and runs alongside the job, typically over 12 to 18 months, so it is worth asking your HR team about before paying for a qualification. Free and self-paced options, such as Microsoft’s own Copilot training and the webinars most providers run, are a sensible way to find out what you need before you book a paid AI course, although they will not replace a day spent on your own work with someone who has done the job.

Outside London and Manchester. The virtual classroom courses from Souters, Your Excellency’s online programmes and our online coaching all work wherever you are, and for a team we run in-house training days at your own offices.

Conferences and events are covered further down, because they do a different job from training and are worth thinking about separately.

The most useful question to ask about any training is what will be different when you are back at your desk, because that is what your executive will notice. Emily built every eavolve programme, and these are the questions she asked before approving any course for the team of EAs she managed.

1. Who is teaching, and what have they actually done? A trainer who has run a CEO’s office, or who recruits EAs every week, will teach from situations you recognise, which a general facilitator working from slides cannot do.
2. Will you work on your own material? The best days ask you to bring your real inbox, your real diary and your real executive’s priorities, because that is where the change happens. Case studies about a fictional company are easier for a trainer to run, but they rarely change anything once you are back at work.
3. What happens afterwards? A plan you leave with, a follow-up call, a peer group or a workbook you keep all help the training to stick, which a certificate on its own cannot do.
4. How big is the room? In a small group your own situation gets discussed, and in a large cohort it usually does not.
5. Does the price include everything? Check VAT, materials and any follow-up, and ask whether a payment plan is available if you are funding it yourself.

Accredited, CPD and regulated are not the same thing. A regulated qualification sits on the Ofqual register and is awarded by a recognised awarding body, which is what Level 3 or Level 4 means when a provider uses it properly. CPD accreditation means an independent body, usually The CPD Standards Office, has checked that a course is structured learning and can count towards continuing professional development hours, which matters when an L&D team needs that to approve the spend. If a provider says accredited without naming the body, ask which one. Our Strategy Training Day and Future Ready Training Day are both CPD accredited, and we mention it because employers often need to see it.

If you’re asking your employer to fund it, our article on how to ask your employer to fund your training sets out the case in the language a manager approves, and our training budget page explains how training credits work for budget that would otherwise be lost at year end.

A full day of specialist, in-person executive assistant training in the UK costs between £675 and £1,750 plus VAT per person, a regulated qualification studied over several months costs £1,295 to £1,745 plus VAT, and a single one-to-one coaching session costs £195 to £300. The prices in the table above were checked on 7 October 2026 for our article on how much EA training costs in the UK, and they change, so confirm the total with the provider before booking.

What an employer should budget. For one experienced EA or PA, use the prices above for a full day of specialist in-person training or a single coaching session, and add the cost of a day away from the desk. For a team of assistants, an in-house training day or a monthly retainer usually works out cheaper per head than sending people individually, and we quote corporate work per day or from £250 an hour plus VAT on retainer.

A course that costs less but changes nothing is poor value however cheap it looks. The way to judge value is to put a number on an hour of your executive’s time, then ask how many of those hours the training will give back over a year. In our experience a day that teaches an EA to brief, prioritise and use AI on real work tends to pay for itself quickly. Payment plans are available on both eavolve training days, and for budget that must be spent before year end, we also sell training credits that are valid for twelve months against any programme.

An executive assistant in London is paid £50,000 to £70,000, in Manchester £40,000 to £55,000 and across the rest of the UK £40,000 to £50,000, according to the Lily Shippen Salary Survey 2026, published in March 2026 by our sister company, the specialist EA, PA and chief of staff recruiter. EA Managers, the people who lead EA teams, earned a median of £65,000 across the UK in the separate EA Manager Salary Survey 2026, with London at £74,000 and Manchester, Leeds and the North at £55,000.

Permanent base salary ranges from the Lily Shippen Salary Survey 2026. Across the whole Business Support market the survey puts the London median at about £54,500 and the Manchester median at about £44,500.

The EA Manager survey, run from 18 August to 28 September 2026 with 126 responses, is the only UK study we know of that looks specifically at assistants who manage other assistants. Its findings explain why training budgets are often the first thing an EA Manager asks for: 73% of those who took on management duties got no pay rise or a token one, 55% kept the same title, 61% feel underpaid and 76% would move for more money within twelve months. The forty-page report is free to download from the article.

Who else publishes research on the profession. For UK pay data, the Lily Shippen survey and the EA Manager survey are the two we would start with, because both look only at assistants. The annual salary guides from Hays, Robert Half and Reed cover business support roles across the UK and are useful for a second opinion, although they group EAs with other office roles and give wider bands. Executive Support Media publishes Executive Support Magazine for the global profession, and PA Life and Today’s PA cover UK news and events. The larger international studies, such as ASAP’s State of the Profession and the Office Dynamics training-needs survey, draw largely American samples and are worth reading for the trends rather than the salaries.

A senior executive assistant runs the executive’s office and a chief of staff runs part of the executive’s agenda, which is why a chief of staff is not a senior EA with a better title. The EA role is built around the executive’s time, information and relationships, and at senior level it carries real authority: spend limits, decisions taken alone, the judgement about who reaches the executive and when. The chief of staff role is built around outcomes the executive owns but cannot personally drive, so a chief of staff leads cross-functional projects, prepares and sometimes chairs leadership meetings, holds people to commitments on the executive’s behalf and contributes their own view on the decisions being made.

The move from EA to chief of staff is not for everyone, and the assistants who make it well are usually the ones who were already doing parts of the job informally. Lily has worked on chief of staff briefs through our sister company for over five years, and her consistent observation is that the placements that fail are the ones where the title changed and the remit did not. Our articles on what a chief of staff actually does, EA vs chief of staff and how to move from EA to chief of staff go into the detail.

What the pay gap looks like. In the Lily Shippen Salary Survey 2026, London executive assistants are benchmarked at £50,000 to £70,000 and chiefs of staff at £80,000 to £150,000, and in Manchester the ranges are £40,000 to £55,000 and £70,000 to £120,000. The scope of the role drives the number far more than the title does, and our chief of staff salary article explains what the figure is really telling you.

Training that moves an EA towards the role. Start with the Chief of Staff Readiness Assessment, £149 plus VAT, a structured assessment completed in your own time and led by an experienced assessor, which returns a written report on your strengths, risk areas and recommended next step within five working days. It is not a test you pass or fail, and for some people the honest answer is that the EA role at its most senior is the better fit. For those ready to go further, our chief of staff training programmes teach a practical operating framework over a full day in person, with an online version to follow, and the Global PA Association’s ILM chief of staff masterclass is the main alternative in the UK.

The fastest way for an executive assistant to learn AI tools is to use the one your organisation already permits on the four pieces of work that take most of your week: the inbox, the diary, briefing your executive, and the tasks you repeat. Most assistants in Microsoft environments have Copilot, many have ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini available through a work or personal account, and the skills transfer between them, so what matters is the work you use it on rather than which tool you have.

Start with these, in this order, on your own material:

1. Summarise a long email thread and ask for the three decisions your executive needs to make from it.
2. Draft a reply in your executive’s voice, then edit it, because the edit teaches you what the tool gets wrong.
3. Turn a diary clash into options with the trade-offs written out, so the executive chooses rather than reads.
4. Condense a long pre-read into a one-page brief, then check every figure against the source.
5. Save the prompts that worked as reusable templates, and write down the rules: what must never be pasted in, and how you check an output before it leaves you.

If you would rather have the workflows written out for you, the eavolve AI Bundle (£69 including VAT) gives you a workflow playbook, twelve copy-and-adapt workflows for the executive office and an agreement to settle the rules with your executive before you build anything.

When you’re choosing AI training, in London or anywhere else, apply the same test as for any other course and add one more: ask whether the day runs on the tools you are actually allowed to use at work. A course built around a tool your IT team has blocked will not help you, and at our first Future Ready day most of the room could only use Copilot at work. Good AI training is built for EAs and PAs rather than adapted from a general course, uses your own work, runs in person in a small group, ends with a plan and includes a follow-up.

Our Future Ready EA & PA Training Day is built on exactly that basis. It is one day in London or Manchester, led by Lily Shippen, Alice Garside and Emily Partridge, and it runs on Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini according to what each delegate is allowed. You leave with a 30-day plan for one change in your role and a 30-minute follow-up call about a month later. Our write-up of what the first Future Ready day taught us describes how it ran, and our article on what AI training for EAs and PAs should cover goes deeper on the skills. The Global PA Association runs a shorter AI programme, and EA Campus runs tool-specific Copilot days, both of which suit assistants who want a shorter, tool-focused session.

Everything eavolve runs on AI, with dates, prices and the in-house and self-paced options, is on the AI training for executive assistants and PAs page.

The two large executive assistant events in London in 2027 are The PA Show and The EA Campus Conference. The PA Show runs on 3 and 4 March 2027 at ExCeL London, is free to attend and covers PAs, EAs, VAs, office managers and chiefs of staff. The EA Campus Conference is listed for 19 to 21 May 2027 at ISH Venues on Great Portland Street, with 150 in-person places, an online option and passes from £245 online to £950 for full access at the time of writing. The PA Show Summit, a residential event for senior assistants at Down Hall Hotel, has its 2027 dates still to be confirmed. Both organisers publish programmes that change, so check the dates before you book travel.

Events give you two things a course does not, a sense of where the profession is going and people you will stay in touch with, and they are worth going to for those reasons. They are less effective at changing how you work day to day, so we would see a conference as something to go alongside training, not in place of it.

We run smaller, more frequent gatherings. The Conversations series is a set of 45-minute virtual sessions at 12:30 on a weekday, £6 each, with the current dates on our upcoming dates page. The Secret Club, our annual membership for EAs and PAs, meets monthly online and twice a year in person, once in the north and once in the south, and the 2026 cohort is full with interest open for 2027. The EA Leaders’ Table is our group for the people who manage EA teams, and you can register interest from the EA Manager salary article.

eavolve® is a specialist training business for executive assistants, personal assistants and chiefs of staff, founded in 2024 and part of the Lily Shippen group. Emily Partridge, our Managing Director, creates and delivers every programme after fifteen years as a senior EA in FTSE 100 CEO offices and a later role managing sixty EAs globally, and Lily Shippen, our founder, has been recruiting executive assistants for over a decade through the sister company that carries her name. We train in London, at Uncommon in Holborn or Liverpool Street, and in Manchester.

CPD accreditation. eavolve is an accredited provider with The CPD Standards Office, provider number 22769, and the EA & PA Strategy Training Day comes with a CPD accredited certificate of completion, and the Future Ready EA & PA Training Day is CPD accredited for 9 CPD hours. That matters when your L&D team needs continuing professional development evidence before approving a course, and it is one of the reasons employers fund places on the day. If you need the certificate wording or the provider number for an approval form, email emily@eavolve.co.uk and we will send it over.

What delegates say. Sian White, an executive assistant in construction, wrote that the Strategy Training Day “left me feeling empowered, determined, and genuinely motivated”, and Anna Baines, an executive PA in travel, called the Future Ready day “very insightful and practical training”. The full reviews are on the Strategy Training Day reviews and Future Ready reviews pages.

New London and Manchester dates for both training days are announced on the upcoming dates page, and payment plans are available on both. The simplest way to book, or to work out which programme fits, is a free 30-minute Discovery Call with Emily on Zoom or Teams. You can also email emily@eavolve.co.uk to reserve a place or to register interest in a date.

Prices were checked on 7 October 2026, salary ranges come from the Lily Shippen Salary Survey 2026 published in March 2026, and event dates were taken from the organisers’ sites on 26 October 2026. We update this page when they change.

Still unsure?

Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call with Emily. She will tell you which option fits your role and your budget.

Training days from £675 + VAT