Virtual assistants are administrative assistants that work out of virtual offices. While having past secretarial experience provides much benefit, it’s not necessarily a qualification for a VA. It really depends on the services you choose to offer in your business. The following are some of the skills that all VA’s should have.

Excellent Computer skills are the most important skill you should have. You will be using your computer for all the projects your clients would need you to help with, so it’s important to know how to run your computer and how to provide proper computer maintenance. You should also be familiar with office type programs, such as Excel and Word.

You should also have some good organizational skills. You would be working on several projects for one or more clients, so you will need to be able to keep things organized to help things run more smoothly. Having some kind of organizational plan will enable you to find pertinent information quickly when a client is in need of it.

Excellent communication skills are another important aspect of the VA business. Since you will be working in a virtual environment, with little or no face to face contact with your clients, communication through other means will be extremely important. One should have good skills in communicating through phone, email and even Instant Messaging.

Another skill one should have to become a virtual assistant is customer service abilities. Whether or not your clients want you to perform customer service for their projects; you should still be able to provide these skills at least for your clients. Your clients are your customers; therefore you will need to treat them as such.

Good typing skills are a must for any VA. Transcription is a popular task that clients tend to outsource to VA’s. Those who are able to type at decent speeds will benefit as a Virtual Assistant quite easily. Clients have many different forms of audio content that will need to be typed into written documents, so a high typing speed would be necessary.

One should also have good writing skills. Clients will need all sorts of projects written; from articles to business letters to email messages. This is where your writing skills will need to be up to snuff. You are not only showcasing your professionalism here, but you’re also representing your clients when performing their writing tasks.

The rest of the qualifications or skills you would need would depend on the type of services you wish to offer potential clients. Most virtual assistants perform tasks that secretaries, working in an office building, don’t normally provide for their company. So, some clients won’t necessarily be looking for VA’s with strong secretarial backgrounds.

What they really want to see are experience and skills in specific areas that they need help in. For example, if they’re looking for someone to help with web designing, they would want that VA to have good web designing skills or experience. So, they would more than likely hire a VA with web designing experience over someone with just secretarial experience.

Other tasks a virtual assistant might offer would be bookkeeping, concierge services and even desktop publishing. No matter what services you decide to offer, you should be able to show good knowledge or experience in that area and clients will contact you. So, don’t worry too much if you don’t have too strong of a secretarial background if you have other skills to back them up.

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