Celebrities, sales managers, executives, and entrepreneurs – all kinds of busy professionals need a personal assistant to tackle correspondence, appointments, and other essential tasks. An efficient personal assistant serves as a massive help to professionals who have several duties to complete. If you are planning to hire a personal assistant, there are certain traits to look for. So, let us analyze personal assistant attributes.
What is a personal assistant?
Personal assistant represents the job position for an employee who assists the employer with their daily business or personal tasks. Personal assistants directly help employers and manage their daily tasks, professional and personal.
What are the Qualities of a Good Personal Assistant?
Recruiting the right assistant can simplify an employer’s professional life in many ways. Qualities of a Good Personal Assistant are excellent communication skills, outstanding personality, great organizational skills, flexibility, problem-solving Skills, strong experience, excellent computer skills. In simple words, an ideal personal assistant is great at communication, organization, problem-solving, and operating relevant software programs.
How much do personal assistants make?
In the US, personal assistants’ average hourly rate is around $15 per hour in 2021. The national average salary for a Personal Assistant is $26,350 in the United States.
Here is a detailed description of the qualities of an excellent personal assistant:
Effective Communicator
Personal assistants have to regularly communicate with various people to set up appointments, convey messages and other important information. So, your assistant must possess effective communication skills to avoid misunderstandings and establish clarity in your business-related interactions. While communicating, the assistant needs to stay calm and composed since, at times, he/she will have to deal with argumentative or difficult people.
Outgoing Persona
A personal assistant must have a sociable personality, as he/she must talk to many different people. At the same time, he/she should be polite, courteous, and pleasant to speak to. An assistant needs to maintain these qualities in his/her speech irrespective of the circumstances and the type of person he/she is talking to.
What Makes A Great Personal Assistant?
Generally, people tend to talk well when deals are going smoothly but may adopt a resentful tone in tough times. In such scenarios, the assistant would have to use stressful communication to convince the other party. However, it is the balance of assertiveness and courtesy required on an assistant to prevent unwanted solicitation.
Good Personal Assistant is Organized Worker
Personal assistants should be attentive, detail-oriented, and well-organized. This is because they carry out various responsibilities like setting appointments, planning your work schedule, handling calls, noting down messages, checking emails and posts, and similar other tasks that call for diligence. An assistant should be able to sort out tasks as per their nature of urgency.
Good Personal Assistant is Adaptable
There are times when you have to assign tasks to your assistant with prior warning. So, an assistant should be flexible and open to tackling work in such kinds of situations. Rather than panicking, a level-headed assistant will go into damage-control mode and not take any unnecessary stress.
Good Personal Assistant Efficient Problem Solver
An assistant is like a ‘filter’ for his/her boss, in such a way that he/she goes through the calls, emails, and other communication but presents the primary matters first. So, the boss can focus on more important things and delegate the rest to the assistant. This kind of ‘filtering’ can be done efficiently by an assistant who is a good problem solver. Also, the assistant should handle complex tasks independently without having to consult his/her boss.
Good Personal Assistant is Computer Savvy
Personal assistants need to use software programs for scheduling, planning, and communicating. They should be aware of the software used for word, email, calendar, and related things. Further, assistants have to research the internet frequently and thus, need to be proficient in research abilities.
But now, let us get deeper. In the next 20 minutes in the video below, you can see – How to exceed expectations as an Executive Assistant or Personal Assistant?
Experienced
While an aspiring assistant may be educated and knowledgeable, yet some high-level professionals still prefer hiring experienced assistants. Knowledge is essential, but there are some situations only an experienced assistant can handle well. However, after working with a mid-level professional, assistants get to polish their skills and apply requisite learning to manage more complicated tasks.
After leaving Wells Fargo Bank in 2014, Daniel began a career as a finance consultant, advising companies and individuals on economic policy, labor relations, and financial management.
At Nimblefreelancer.com, Daniel writes about personal finance topics, value estimation, budgeting strategies, retirement planning, and portfolio diversification.
Read more on Daniel Smith's biography page.
Contact Daniel: daniel@nimblefreelancer.com
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