Online Executive and Admin Assistant Training

Sweet - SarcMark: A punctuation mark for sarcasm!

January 15, 2010 at 04:51 PM | (1) Comments

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read an email, IM, Facebook post or comment online and not known if the person writing the remark was serious or not. Most of the time I don’t even know them personally, just via email with no handle on their personalities so it’s hard to tell.

As discussed in our training, there is no place for sarcasm in business communications but now, with SarcMark, a punctuation mark specifically for sarcasm, that might be changing.

Say you’re in sales and you’re trying to build a rapport with a potential client by being funny—great idea if you’re in person but via email or text, a bit risky—then this new punctuation mark could help. However, if it doesn’t catch on and reach critical mass, no one will know what it is anyway.

We’re gonna keep an eye on this one but given that it costs $1.99 to download (why not free?), call us skeptical… don’t get us wrong though, the idea is genius and we’re pulling for it to succeed. And you can be sure we’ll update our training if is does catch on.

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So you wanna be a Virtual Assistant (VA)?

January 12, 2010 at 03:39 PM | (5) Comments

Sydni Craig-Hart Beyond the e-learning modules, downloadable templates/checklists and resources that we provide to our enrollees, the other main component of our training is the member forum where they put us through our paces and ask us anything that comes up in either their job search or while working as assistants.

One common line of questioning surrounds that of being a Virtual Assistant or VA. What do they do? How do they get started? What do they charge?... and any number of other questions. Not being virtual assistants ourselves, we felt it best to seek out a top VA—in this case a VA coach and trainer—and get their take on how they made the transition to becoming a VA and what working as a VA is all about.

Thankfully Sydni Craig-Hart, founder of EAtoVA.com—a VA coaching service—, was more than willing to get on the phone with us and answer our questions. Now that our members have had a chance to listen to this interview, we’re pleased to offer it to you, our blog readers, to get a better understanding of what being a virtual assistant is all about. Enjoy!

Click here to listen to or download the .mp3 interview

To listen now, just click the link.
To download the .mp3 to save and listen to later on your computer, iPod or other mp3 player:
For Mac users, hold “Ctrl” and click the link then select “save linked file to…” to save it to your desktop.
For PC users, “right click” the link and “save link as…”.

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Happy (belated) New Year!

January 06, 2010 at 05:06 PM | (0) Comments

fireworks Happy (belated) New Year!

Here’s to wishing you and yours a successful 2010 to kick off the new decade. ProAssisting came into being last year and this year our goal is to expand upon the great successes we’ve had so far…

Just to re-cap, in addition to becoming a featured writer for Monster’s AdminSecret, we had a very robust beta testing period thanks to their community of assistants who put our training through its paces. Then, we opened our doors and right out of the gate formed a 1-for-1 partnership with the prestigious and world wide philanthropy Dress for Success. All-in-all, a great start to our fledgling company!

Welcome to Vegas To get some rest and relazation before the start of 2010, Steph and I headed to Las Vegas. Stephanie has never been to Vegas so we decided to leave NYC behind for a New Year’s Eve out on the strip. What a great trip we had… and yes, if you can believe it, we left winners!

Sadie wasn’t too happy with us for being left behind but she had a great time staying at our dog walker’s home and playing with his 1 year old puppy so all was not lost… I think she’s just getting over being mad at us:) I’m sure Steph will post some more pics of her soon.

As for 2010 and ProAssisting, we’ve got some great free content coming your way via our blog, we’re working on our free “Assistant Tool Kit” which will give you some of the information and tactics we teach on the inside of our training straight to your inbox via email and we’re going to continue to work with Dress for Success by helping their clients achieve greater success through our training. Should be an exciting time so stick around and check back often to see what we’re cookin’ up to help assistants of every variety!

Flickr Creative Commons image by Mr Magoo ICU & Nevada Tourism

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