An office assistant typing test checks that you can produce clean written work at a reasonable pace: emails, letters, memos, minutes, spreadsheets and forms. Administrative roles attract a lot of applicants, and a typing assessment is one of the few objective filters an employer can apply early, which is why so many office and administrative assistant postings include one.
The test above uses business-style text for three minutes, which is close to what most administrative assessments look like.
What speed office employers expect
For general office assistant and administrative assistant roles, the figure most commonly asked for is 45 to 50 words per minute. Entry-level and junior administrative posts sometimes accept 35 to 40. Executive assistant and senior administrative roles frequently ask for 60 or more, because the volume of correspondence is higher and the work is less forgiving of delay.
Accuracy expectations are usually stated as 95 per cent or better. In practice, an office assistant who types 45 WPM with almost no errors is worth more than one who types 65 WPM and leaves typos in client-facing letters, because somebody senior ends up proofreading everything the second person writes.
What the test material is like
Office typing tests usually use realistic business text rather than random sentences, which changes what you need to practise:
- Capital letters everywhere. Names, job titles, company names, months, product names. Every capital is a Shift key, and using the wrong hand for Shift is the most common hidden brake on office typing speed.
- Punctuation that prose does not use. Colons in headings, semicolons in lists, apostrophes, quotation marks around quoted terms, brackets and hyphens.
- Numbers in context. Dates, order references, prices, extension numbers and percentages, mixed into sentences rather than in tidy columns.
- Formal sentence structure. Longer sentences with subordinate clauses, which are harder to read ahead in than everyday writing.
How to prepare
- Fix your Shift technique first. Use the opposite hand for every capital. If you press left Shift with the same hand that types the letter, you will lose several words per minute on business text and never understand why. The finger placement guide explains the correct pattern.
- Drill punctuation deliberately. Our punctuation practice targets exactly the marks that appear in correspondence.
- Practise on business text, not novels. The rhythm is different. The advanced and professional material in our lesson library is written for this.
- Run three-minute tests, not one-minute ones. Administrative assessments are usually three to five minutes and your accuracy behaves differently over that length.
What else you may be asked to do
Increasingly the typing test is bundled with short practical exercises: formatting a document, correcting a passage containing deliberate errors, entering data into a spreadsheet, or drafting a short reply to a sample email. None of these require special preparation beyond being comfortable with everyday office software, but it is worth knowing they may appear so the format does not surprise you. Proofreading exercises in particular reward the same habit as the typing test itself, which is reading carefully rather than quickly.
Turning the result into something useful
If you can honestly type 50 words per minute at 97 per cent accuracy, put it on your CV. It is a concrete, verifiable claim in a document usually full of vague ones, and for administrative roles it is directly relevant. Take the test on this page a few times across different days and use a figure you can reproduce, not your single best score. If an employer tests you and the result is well below what you claimed, that is worse than not having claimed anything.
How much typing speed really matters for the role
It is worth being honest about this: typing speed is a screening tool, not the job. No office assistant has ever been promoted for words per minute. What speed buys you is time and attention. If typing is effortless you can listen while taking notes in a meeting, draft a reply while someone is talking to you, and clear an inbox before lunch instead of after it. The employer is not really buying keystrokes; they are buying the capacity that automatic typing frees up.
This is also why employers weight the accuracy figure more heavily than candidates expect. An assistant who produces clean work does not create a second job for whoever reviews it, and in a small office that reviewer is usually the person doing the hiring.
A thirty-day plan to reach 50 WPM
If you are currently somewhere around 35 words per minute, four weeks of short daily sessions is usually enough to reach the level most administrative postings ask for. The plan that works looks like this:
- Days 1 to 7: technique only. Correct hand position, opposite-hand Shift, eyes off the keyboard. Expect your speed to fall during this week. It always does, and it always comes back higher.
- Days 8 to 14: accuracy. Slow to a pace where you make almost no errors and hold it. The target is 98 per cent, not a WPM number.
- Days 15 to 21: the awkward characters. Capitals, punctuation and numbers, which is where business text differs from ordinary practice text.
- Days 22 to 30: speed and stamina. Three-minute and five-minute runs, tracking whether your last minute matches your first.
Twenty focused minutes a day beats two hours at the weekend, because what you are building is muscle memory and that consolidates with repetition rather than duration. Our practice plan generator will build this schedule around your actual starting numbers if you would rather not follow a generic version.
Common questions
Is 40 WPM enough for an office assistant job? For many junior and entry-level administrative posts, yes. For a general office assistant role advertised at 45 to 50, it will put you at the bottom of the shortlist rather than out of it, particularly if your accuracy is high. If you have a few weeks before applying, the gap between 40 and 50 is one of the easiest to close.
Will they test me on Word and Excel too? Very often. Administrative assessments commonly pair the typing test with a short practical exercise: formatting a document, using styles, sorting a spreadsheet or writing a formula. These are separate skills from typing and worth a quick refresher if it has been a while.
Should I put my typing speed on my CV? For administrative roles, yes, provided it is honest and recent. State the speed and the accuracy together. A vague claim to be a fast typist adds nothing; a specific, verifiable figure does.
Other job typing tests
Preparing for a different role? These tests are set up the same way: Clerical Typing Test · Receptionist Typing Test · Virtual Assistant Typing Test · Pre Employment Typing Test.
Start practising now
Scroll back up and take the test on this page as many times as you like. When you want a structured plan rather than repeated attempts, our personalised practice plan builds a schedule around your current speed and the keys that slow you down, and the full lesson library covers everything from the home row to numbers and punctuation.