Working from home, fun, challenging, exciting, you name it, as we covered in the last post you can use Fiverr to sell your new work from home skills, but what if, you have not developed any skills yet. You are used to work with people, see people every day, having a boss, a manager or supervisor telling you what to do. In order to become a successful working from home professional you will need the skills sets to keep you clients happy.
The easiest skill you can pick at this time and economy are computer skills, there is a whole world of new skills available for free you Youtube.com, just visit the site and do a quick search “how to work as VA Virtual Assistant” or “how to make great spreadsheets in Excel”, virtual assistant is someone that can with little effort and investment make a difference on the day to day on a company, although this post is designed to help the worker, if you are project manager and you get familiar with Fiverr, you can have a team of 100 Fiverr staff at your finger tips, someone that can create quickly something you would need 2/3 hours of learning, plus special software to make it happen keep in mind.
I have used Youtube for many years and learned great tricks, about several tasks, even how to fix my bathroom sink, but if you want to become a good VA you will need some good Microsoft office skills, how about Lynda.com, now a Linkedin company, Lynda is an amazing site that even will give you a certificate after you complete the class. At the time of this writing, I have a free access to Lynda.com via the Public Library system of my City, check with your City if its offered, before that from previous employers the companies were paying for the access, usually a fee/ year, dont remember how much, but if you work for any fortune 500 company I am sure there is a program that will reimburse you for the cost.
Get familiar with Microsoft Office tools (will cover free tools on part 3) learn how to make a great looking spreadsheet in Excel, learn how to use Word, to generate a letter, get familiar with Calendars, project management is nothing more that organization, and the great thing about it, if that once someone uses your service, and they like they become repeat customers. Virtual assistants are great project managers.
Remember your computer or laptop is a machine that sooner or later will die on you, is not a matter of if, is when, and your clients do not want to know you lost your homework. So get familiar with Dropbox, Onedrive, Google Drive, any tool that will make it easier for you to share your work online with your customers, and when (yes when) you machine crashes, you can easily continue to provide a service.