How to Expand Your VA Skills

In my experience, on-the-job learning is the best way to acquire new skills as a Virtual Assistant. Creating solutions and working through issues is the best way to really get your head around what matters. But what if you find yourself with more time than work and you want to improve your skill-set? Where should you start? In this episode of The RocketGirl Show, I'll share the four ideas for staying sharp.

TRANSCRIPT 

I'm Belinda Wasser, also known as RocketGirl. Today, we're going to talk about how to expand your skills when you're a virtual assistant.  

In my experience, on the job learning is the best way to acquire a new skill. I find that by using a real example and that when I need to produce a result, I learn and retain the information much better. However, sometimes I have more time than work and I want to expand my skills. So today we're going to talk about exactly how to do that.  

The first thing I want you to do is to follow your interest. There are no such thing as special skills that will get you better clients, or that will get you a higher hourly rate. You really want to stick with what you like. If you were to go to my RocketGirl Solutions website and look at my list of services, there are things that range in terms of technical ability, years of experience. However, everything on that list I like doing, and you want to make sure that that's the case with you too, because you'll get better at it and you'll enjoy it when you follow your interest. 

Okay, the next thing I want you to think about is leveraging the skills you already have. So for example, Let's say you are a really good or even great user of mail chip, and you know all about how to send out email newsletters. Well, you might not know that they also have a landing page feature. So what if you were to expand your knowledge of one product beyond the scope of what you already know? Many applications are like that where there's another step or another level that you can take to expand and broaden that particular skill.  

This one is hard because people do not want to do this. They really resist learning one thing at a time. But here's why. There's a couple of reasons. The first is that I want you to get a feeling of satisfaction, like you're accomplishing something  and you're checking a box. 

But here's the second, and this is something that I think people miss. Let's say you decide to learn Constant Contact or you decide to learn Ontraport. If you learn how to do email newsletters and how to tag and import audiences in one of those applications and a new client comes and says, "Okay, I'd like you to do my newsletter and my tagging and take care of my list in Mailerlite or in InfusionSoft. You're going to know all the parts of that type of software, and you're going to be able to use that skill more easily in a different application.  

Same thing with websites. If you understand how WordPress works, when you go over to Squarespace, you're going to understand there's navigation. There's pages, there's sections, there's plugins. So by learning one deeply, you really are able to broaden your knowledge across a lot of different applications. You want to set up a system to document your new skills. I use Evernote for this. And whenever possible, I want you to grab screenshots because a picture is worth a thousand words, right? And that holds true with screenshots of applications when you're recording settings, so set up something that works for you. Like I said, I use Evernote, and I use very descriptive titles. So when I'm searching, I can find the information that I need very easily.  

And the last thing is, I want you to make it part of your routine. When learning is part of your routine, your skills will naturally expand over time. And I love learning new things. It's one of my favorite parts of being a virtual assistant is being able to figure out something new. And I bet you'll feel the same way if you try this approach. 

Before we go, I just want to invite you to my free online classroom. We have almost 13,000 members represented in 47 plus countries, and you'll find over there a community you'll find learning. You'll find lots of information about being a VA, whether you're just starting out or you've been on for a while. So just type the virtual assistant connection in the search bar at the top of Facebook, and then click the join button, and I'll happily welcome you in. I'm Belinda Wasser, signing off until next time. Bye bye.