What Makes a Good Personal Assistant?

A good personal assistant (PA) eases the life of an industry personnel. He manages compulsory office tasks that support the business from the back.

Becoming a personal assistant (PA) might sound attainable, but being impactful is difficult. If you want to in this diversified era of personal assistants, you require divine knowledge to makeover.

To become an excellent personal assistant, strong organizational skills, time management, and digital skills are core skills.

This article will explore eight researched professional skills to become an excellent personal assistant. Let’s learn about these core components.

Core Skills of a Successful Personal Assistant

Today’s world is growing faster than in previous decades. New technologies are emerging nearly every day, so the list of professional skills is becoming uncountable. 

Among thousands of expertise, a dedicated PA should convey these mandatory skills: 

• He should have the organizational aptitude to manage each client individually.
• A good PA should have a sound administrative orientation to leverage proficiency. 
• Providing responsive customer service is another plus as a successful personal assistant.
• Managing phone calls or planning business trips improves the quality of assistance service. 
• Being intransigence to time management and responsiveness to the service.
• Can communicate effectively in both verbal and non-verbal formats.
• Adaptive to the mixture of instruction-based and independent working styles.
• Handling multiple tasks simultaneously is a good-to-go skill for PA.
• Focused and attentive decision-making ability enhances the credibility and quality of a personal assistant. 
• Maintaining professional secrecy is another primary skill while serving as a PA.

Becoming a profound personal assistant may seem overwhelming. There are also numerous skills that you should develop to become good at personal assistant service. Let’s talk about these skills one by one.

8 Proven Ways to Become a Good Personal Assistant

The qualities of a good personal assistant are wider than just acquiring some foundational skills.

Let’s discuss how to stand out as a personal assistant in this competitive environment. 

1. Adaptability and Problem-Solving Abilities

A personal assistant supports the client with repetitive or static tasks. Therefore, the creative personal assistant should be flexible and able to adjust schedules according to business requirements. 

Another important aspect of being a qualified personal assistant is adapting to the brand voice of the client’s company/business. You can start with a dedicated conversation to understand the company’s nature and customer behavior. 

Solving immediately arising problems without any prescribed guidance is a remarkable quality of a personal assistant. Start developing problem-solving skills by identifying the problem first. That’s how it will be half solved; next is brainstorming, implementing, and revising different solutions. 

2. Organizational and Time Management Skills

Apart from personal assistant service, any corporate individual must have organizational expertise to thrive in that environment. A good personal assistant needs to have skills beyond the common range.

A productive PA keeps a detailed calendar, including scheduling meetings in advance. Other organizational skills include taking notes or making lists of tasks you can access over the phone or computer. Also, the PA should keep records of important conversations and write emails to reduce miscommunication.

A good PA should understand recording systems, cloud storage, and promptly usable email templates. He should also be skilled enough to organize and deliver files as clients require. 

Knowledge workers hire personal assistants to simultaneously continue their business process without slothing the potential. The capability to note tasks and allocate time for each is another smart quality of a good personal assistant. 

3. Confidentiality and Trustworthiness

A personal assistant accesses a client’s business operations and internal settings. Therefore, he needs to maintain strict confidentiality about how things are working or other sensitive business information. 

Also, confidentiality in the workplace is very significant in the personal assistant profession. About 64% of employers think that discretion and confidentiality impact business development. 

Another important pillar of being a good personal assistant is maintaining a trusted relationship with clients. 

4. Tech Savviness and Digital Skills

An assistant must cope with industry trends and digital tools to enhance job performance. He also needs to handle repetitive tasks, which consume a lot of time.

Using digital tools for team management or automating the process will save time and make you effective. Of course, you also need to be savvy with personal tech like a laptop and know when to empty the trash to have enough storage or when to install new updates. Technological proficiency can boost the chances of getting hired by 78.2% compared to an ignorant person. 

You can start putting bricks on your assistant journey by adding special skills such as project management tools, recording and file sharing tools, financial recordkeeping tools, and more. 

If you want to stand out in the VA profession, here are prominent digital skills that you could start learning today:

• Project management kits: Trello, ClickUp, Google Calendar 
• Storage & Sharing apps: Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox
• Recordkeeping tools: QuickBooks, Xero, Microsoft Excel
• Data analysis tools: Microsoft Power BI, SQL, Zoho 

5. Effective Communication and Interpersonal Skills

Communication is the mightiest key to success in personal assistant service. From managers’ desks to general people, you should deliver the message in a way that fits all. The assistant should be gentle in creating meaningful relationships and serving the client’s objectives. 

A prime responsibility of a PA is providing clients with regular updates about workflow. The person in the back office should be able to accept, process, and deliver the information to the right stakeholders. 

However, the personal assistant must carry the brand voice on behalf of clients to maintain relations with their customers. To manage the flawless communication virtually, you can check out these tools: 

• Zoom
• Slack
• Google Meet
• Microsoft Team

6. Proactive Attitude and Anticipatory Thinking

Individuals who can take corrective action on issues without prior instructions convey proactiveness in the workplace. Being resourceful as a personal assistant will help you become more active and credible. 

For example, think you’re suggesting an efficient way of recording information to your client. Isn’t it fascinating? This proactiveness will lighten the enthusiasm towards the personal assistant role. 

Having the power to forecast upcoming situations improves awareness of potential threats. This anticipatory thinking ability will help you overcome unfortunate issues. 

7. Balancing Personal and Professional Boundaries

Setting clear boundaries between your personal and professional life gives you control as a personal assistant. You should know when to step in and when to get back while respecting the boss’s personal privacy and your time. 

First, you must set clear goals about your availability and service requests that you can fulfill. Second, a specific communication medium, such as Skype or WhatsApp, should be set to keep precise track and confidentiality. 

To deliver a valued PA service, you should be aware of the client’s behavioral pattern. This will enable you to synchronize and provide information to the client promptly and smartly. Taking a balanced approach to PA service can ensure a healthy and respectful connection that leads to long-term sustainability. 

8. Continuous Learning and Professional Development

In today’s world, you must learn every day to drive potential growth and diversification in your working style. You should focus on learning to communicate as a personal assistant or master closing a deal. 

Focus on gaining industry-specific knowledge to conduct your assistance service smoothly. For example, if you’re focusing on becoming a personal assistant for a real estate company, you should learn the basic terminology skills regarding that real estate industry. 

Common Mistakes of PA and How to Avoid Them 

The personal assistant job is rigorous and requires continuous performance development. It requires patience, integrity, and transparency to improve over time. 

However, we commonly need to correct things while starting or performing the job. Some frequently occurred mistakes by personal assistants and feasible solutions to overcome are listed as follows:

Conclusion

A good personal assistant job is not a one-night show but a continuous learning and development process. Improving your competitive skills, especially communication, attention to detail, maintaining confidentiality, being tech-savvy, and time management, will help you grow more.