My daughter who is a Junior in High School just took the ACT.
Yuck.
It’s interesting that High School prepares you to take standardized tests. It doesn’t prepare you to work a real job.
And…come to think of it, neither does a college degree.
Yes, it helps you.
Yes, it teaches you to think.
Yes, it prepares you to learn what you actually need to learn.
But it doesn’t give you actual work skills.
The same thing is happening in the Philippines with “VA courses”.
You may have seen jobseekers on Onlinejobs.ph bragging about their VA training certificates. So you interview and give them a test task, thinking that they’re qualified because they’ve gone through VA training. But once you get the results or hire them, you end up disappointed?
I know some of you have experienced that. You’re the ones who comment on my social media saying that Filipino workers are low-skilled and overestimate their qualifications.
I understand where you’re coming from. Over the years, we’ve seen VA training programs proliferate all over the Philippines. Some of these programs are actually good. They help their students develop valuable skills to turn them into great VAs.
But a growing number are just bad.
There are people out there who take advantage of Filipinos desperate for work. They sell these useless training programs that guarantee high-paying online jobs. They reinforce these ‘guarantees’ with promises of new houses, cars, and computers.
“With this training, you can get multiple high-paying, easy online jobs! No experience is needed! You don’t even need a laptop! ”
This is the thumbnail for a popular YouTube video in the Philippines promising easy jobs:
Ads like this are widespread in the Philippines. They sell dirt cheap training to hundreds of thousands of desperate people.
As a result, these people make jobseeker profiles thinking they’re qualified. They believe they can do the job they “trained” for and that the work is so easy they can juggle multiple clients simultaneously.
It’s only when they get rejected and reprimanded by employers like you they realize that maybe this job wasn’t as easy as they thought.
I’m not defending their actions. What these job seekers are doing is wrong. But I also understand the kind of desperation that tempts people to fall for these schemes.
This is why I always say in my emails that you never assume that a VA is “trained.” Be clear about your expectations and know exactly what you want before outsourcing. Unless there’s concrete evidence that they’re qualified (like a portfolio), you should always give training and onboarding.
I’m close to rolling out actual training that you can give to an OFS once you hire them. This is the correct way for training to happen. In the real world. Under employer supervision. With actual work happening after the training happens.
Stay tuned for more…
John