Her Story
About Sheena
Sheena Dunham is the Executive Assistant to the President at Cable Insurance Company in Pompano Beach, Florida. She brings 15 to 16 years of administrative experience to the role, having begun her career as a personal assistant to the marketing manager of a social media company before advancing to executive administrative assistant and then executive assistant positions at a hearing aid company on a contract basis. At Cable Insurance Company, where she has served for two and a half years, Dunham manages schedules for six executives, oversees vendor relationships, and handles office management and interdepartmental communications. She holds a bachelor's degree in business administration specializing in project management from St. Leo University, completed in 2022, and is currently pursuing her project management certificate with plans to obtain Agile or Greenbelt certification. Dunham attributes her success to the ability to step back and consider other perspectives without emotional attachment, which helps identify underlying issues to resolve or prevent problems. She values integrity highly, emphasizing honesty and completing tasks correctly the first time. Among the career advice she shares is to take steps forward even when afraid, as fear diminishes with action and regret is avoided. She advises young women entering the field to approach administrative work with curiosity, learn from the heavy paperwork involved in business operations, and gain knowledge of business and finances. Dunham sees AI as a current challenge due to potential unreliability in summarized information and views opportunities in finance as enabling more efficient business operations, long-term investments, and continuity plans.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sheena
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to the ability to step back and see other perspectives, placing myself in someone else's shoes without being emotionally attached to it. This helps me resolve or prevent problems by looking beyond face value to underlying issues.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I received is even though you're afraid to take the step, take it anyway. One of my bosses said whatever it is that you want to do, just do it anyway. If you think it's gonna go wrong, just do it anyway. The feeling of fear goes away after a while and you don't regret what you do.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
You don't really have to love administrative work. Approach it with curiosity and grow from that. Learn from the administrative role because we do a lot of the heavy paperwork to make sure the business runs appropriately. Approach it with curiosity and open your mind to other parts of a business or how that can apply to your life or career. Everybody should know about business and learn about money and our finances.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge is AI because sometimes the information can be unreliable. It pulls information from everywhere to summarize into what it thinks is the right answer, which may not always be correct and could get us in trouble. We should learn to work with administrative tasks in conjunction with AI but not heavily rely on it. The biggest opportunity in finance is that people should get into it because learning more about money helps businesses run more efficiently, find how to properly invest for long term, and have business continuity plans so businesses can run for generations.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Integrity is very important. Being honest, doing things the right way, and doing it the right way the first time so that you don't have to go back and do it again. Integrity is a huge part of my life and it's worked out really good for me so far.
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