One of the few people I know is Abby. She’s a mother of a 5-year-old boy and enjoys her virtual assistant work in an Australia-based company. Abby’s salary ranges from US$7-10 or P350-P500 per hour. This is incredibly too far compared to what she earned in her previous corporate job for five years. What Abby enjoys right now is more than the feeling of hitting two birds with a stone as she has a career at home, earns more than enough and attends personally the needs of her son.
My story is not far from Abby’s. It’s just that mine is a contrary to her as I am the husband who wants to spend more of my time with my wife and with our future son as my career path right now is more adjustable than of my wife’s. She’s a government employee whose nature of work includes being assigned to different places in the Philippines because it is part of the duties in her line of work. Since I am the one who can adjust with career paths, I chose to explore the opportunities in the virtual world and I found out that I can have a promising career because it was expected that nearly US$3 trillion worth of work will be exchanged or done in the next 10 years, says a categories director of an online platform for work. In addition to that, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) projected that online work will surpass the number of jobs available for Filipinos in the next 5 years, according to a report.
Last week, I read in a social media page of Go Negosyo Center Toril – a center under the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) whose main function is to assist entrepreneurs and to-be-entrepreneurs of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in their business ventures – that a training for virtual assistant work will be conducted. I joined the seminar and learned relevant information about the nature of the post. After the event, I decided to enroll in a 10-day training to become more knowledgeable about the ins-and-outs of this type of work. During the training, I’ve learned that an assistant working virtually like doctors or lawyers can also have his/her own specialization. Examples of a specialization include content marketing and email marketing which require the worker to have writing, reading and few technical skills. Content writing has been based on the concept that content is king so virtual assistants need to have good written communication skills in order to meet the need of the task. This does not always mean though that newcomers in the field should be professional writers as grammatical issues can be solved through a software created for grammar checking.
A virtual assistant should be a good reader is what I also consider as a requirement which simply means that they need to be resourceful in order to come up with quality content and the best way to do so is to read a lot. Lastly, technical skills like basic blogging, simple graphic design and the like are also requirements for someone who intends to do this job religiously. Your written output will be much more appreciated if a picture will be provided along with the texts because aside from the idea that a picture can paint a thousand word, it can also entice readers and make them remember your content. So far, these are just some of the few things I learned about doing a virtual assistant work and I look forward to learning more so I can be an effective virtual worker.
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