The Virtual Assistant Craze in the Philippines

More and more Filipinos are becoming “Virtual Assistants”. They are this elusive group of people who work from home and do things that most people don’t understand. When you ask them what they do, they end up say things like ‘check emails’ or ‘answer calls’ for a client.

It all sounds very shady. But it’s 100% legitimate, I promise.

I want to tell you more about this ‘virtual assistant’ thing. Then you can understand what it is these mythical cats do and figure out if it’s something that you would want to do yourself.

Virtual Assistant (VA) work is the most popular work from home / work online job.

There are lots of other online jobs, but most either require technical expertise (programmers and designers), or for you to talk to talk to people the whole day (ESL and call center). Virtual Assistant work (only) requires admin and computer skills. Which thankfully, most of us have. That’s why it’s becoming so popular – because it seems almost everyone can do it.

Ok, now you’ve got me interested.

But what does a VA actually do?

Admin and computer stuff. I just said so. Duh.

But seriously, a virtual assistant is the online equivalent of an executive assistant. Except that they ‘assist’ online businesses instead of in-person businesses. Online businesses can range from blogs (like this one) to ecommerce stores (think Amazon or Ebay). And since these businesses meet in Skype instead of boardrooms, and correspond over email instead of snail mail, a CEOs assistant wouldn’t need to meet in boardrooms. They’d just need an internet connection. And a computer, yes, they also need a computer.

A virtual assistant’s responsibilities vary depending on a CEOs needs. In most cases, a Virtual Assistant will be expected to be a jack of all trades, not necessarily mastering any specific area. These include doing the stuff online that the CEOs don’t have time to do, such as:

-          Managing and prioritizing email

-          Arranging online meetings

-          Updating a company’s Facebook page

-          Doing research

-          Creating office documents and presentations

-          Posting articles on a company’s blog

These are all tasks that can be learned fairly quickly and don’t require specific technical expertise. Again - why becoming a virtual assistant is the easiest way to start earning from home.

The career path of a Virtual Assistant.

You don’t need to be a Virtual Assistant forever (but you can if you want to). In fact, a large number of virtual assistants find that they are more inclined towards a specific skill and then they become masters of that skill.

That’s how I started. I wanted to earn from home, I just didn’t know what to do. So I became a virtual assistant (even before I knew what a virtual assistant was). I was doing a number of various tasks for business owners that they didn’t have the time to do. Exactly what a virtual assistant does. Eventually, while doing some virtual assistant tasks that had online marketing-related components, I found out that I was good at (and loved) online marketing.

You might find the same thing too. If you want to work online, but don’t know where to start, becoming a virtual assistant is the easiest way to get started and will give you enough experience in different areas for you to be able to figure out what you want to specialize in.

If you want to start learning about how to get started working online and become a virtual assistant, I’ve created a free course just for you. You can access it here

“When I was a kid, my mom didn’t let me spend all day in front of a computer screen. Now I get paid a lot of money to do it.”

-Jason Dulay, Trainer, Work from Home Roadmap