A random thought. Philippines is famous for having a flourishing personal/executive assistant industry (e.g., https://www.athenago.com/). I guess there is a demand for assistants who are engaged in EA and know EA culture; IIRC, people who listed themselves at https://pineappleoperations.org/ were overbooked sometime ago. Have you thought about that as a recommended career path?
Yes, though we weren’t able to work on initiatives to actively advocate for this. Looking back, perhaps this is partly due to my beliefs on the matter (I don’t believe that those with minimal work experience can be really useful assistants) and my focus (I work mostly with students). While I encouraged EA Philippines students to take on operations-oriented roles in general during career advising in my past role as CB, I did not focus on PA.
While there is a demand for PAs/ExAs—to be a good one, you need to have excellent client management abilities (“Are you the right assistant for client X?”) and enough experience with past organizational logistics work to navigate well to be three steps ahead of your client. You also need to be able to “train” your client on how to leverage your skills better to maximize their productivity (some people don’t know how to use assistants). Otherwise, you won’t be as helpful in your impact and may end up just being additional overhead to the EA leader you have as a client.
Those new to the workforce don’t generally have these skills as they mostly get developed and honed over time. I have met some assistants (some from Athena) from our Professionals fellowship who support EAs and, while I’m not privy to their actual work performance, my initial impression is that they all have some decent past work experience.
As EA Philippines invests its energy in Professionals outreach, this could be something to put more time in exploring strategic initiatives that encourage this as a viable career path to pursue more intentionally. CC @Elmerei Cuevas@Alethea Faye Cendaña
A random thought. Philippines is famous for having a flourishing personal/executive assistant industry (e.g., https://www.athenago.com/). I guess there is a demand for assistants who are engaged in EA and know EA culture; IIRC, people who listed themselves at https://pineappleoperations.org/ were overbooked sometime ago. Have you thought about that as a recommended career path?
Yes, though we weren’t able to work on initiatives to actively advocate for this. Looking back, perhaps this is partly due to my beliefs on the matter (I don’t believe that those with minimal work experience can be really useful assistants) and my focus (I work mostly with students). While I encouraged EA Philippines students to take on operations-oriented roles in general during career advising in my past role as CB, I did not focus on PA.
While there is a demand for PAs/ExAs—to be a good one, you need to have excellent client management abilities (“Are you the right assistant for client X?”) and enough experience with past organizational logistics work to navigate well to be three steps ahead of your client. You also need to be able to “train” your client on how to leverage your skills better to maximize their productivity (some people don’t know how to use assistants). Otherwise, you won’t be as helpful in your impact and may end up just being additional overhead to the EA leader you have as a client.
Those new to the workforce don’t generally have these skills as they mostly get developed and honed over time. I have met some assistants (some from Athena) from our Professionals fellowship who support EAs and, while I’m not privy to their actual work performance, my initial impression is that they all have some decent past work experience.
As EA Philippines invests its energy in Professionals outreach, this could be something to put more time in exploring strategic initiatives that encourage this as a viable career path to pursue more intentionally. CC @Elmerei Cuevas @Alethea Faye Cendaña