Virtual Assistant Skills That Make Support Easier to Trust

How do you qualify a virtual assistant (VA)?

Scan resumes, check software proficiencies, and review a list of administrative tasks candidates can perform. While these matter, they rarely predict whether a VA will be a reliable assistant with whom you can partner long-term.

The best way to evaluate a VA’s skills is to assess their ability to support you effectively, including their judgment, communication, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.

In this article, we break down why traditional hiring criteria often fall short and highlight the virtual assistant skills businesses should prioritize. We also explore how to evaluate VA skills, including identifying candidates who will provide long-term value.

TL;DR: Top Skills of a Virtual Assistant

Here are some of the non-negotiable soft and hard skills you should look for in a virtual assistant:

• Strong communication and stakeholder management capabilities
• Task prioritization skills and independent decision-making
• Reliability and consistent follow-through
• Adaptability and problem-solving skills
• Calendar and email management skills
• Document organization and information management
• Financial management and expense tracking
• Project management and workflow creation
• Proficiency with modern business tools and productivity software

Continue reading for an in-depth review of these skills to understand how they affect the quality of support you receive.

Why Most Virtual Assistant Skill Lists Miss What Matters

Many agencies focus on generating long lists of VA skills, such as scheduling meetings, booking travel, updating databases, and handling stakeholder inquiries, to attract potential clients.

This is the wrong approach because while a VA may possess these skills, the lists don’t tell you how well the candidate will perform those responsibilities.

Below are reasons why many VA skills lists fall short in determining the expected performance:

• Skill Lists Focus on Tasks: Many skill lists only sensationalize how many tasks a VA can undertake without highlighting how their support helps achieve the desired outcomes or has an impact on the executive’s workflow.
• They Ignore Business Context: Most lists don’t highlight whether a VA can leverage their institutional knowledge to offer strategic support to their executive. This includes anticipating and addressing your needs to safeguard your focus and work rhythm.
• Soft Skills Are Often Overlooked: Many companies focus heavily on hard skills, such as software proficiency, when evaluating VA candidates. They underestimate the importance of soft skills, such as judgment, anticipation, emotional intelligence, communication, and discretion, which are critical to how well you partner with your VA.
• They Fail to Differentiate between Task Executors and Strategic Partners: It is not possible to tell from the skills list whether a VA is a task executor who requires regular guidance or can be entrusted to make independent decisions. This is important for busy executives as they can trust their VAs to prioritize tasks based on strategic impact without needing frequent guidance.
• They Don’t Reflect How Business Needs Evolve: It is impossible to tell from a basic VA skills list whether the assistant can evolve to meet your business needs. This is essential when looking to partner with an assistant long-term, as opposed to frequently onboarding a new assistant as you scale operations.

Virtual Assistant Skills Businesses Should Prioritize

The most effective VAs possess a balanced combination of strong interpersonal skills and technical expertise to drive operational execution. At ProAssisting, we recommend onboarding a VA who has 51% soft skills and 49% hard skills.

Let’s discuss the skills in detail below:

Virtual Assistant Soft Skills (Judgment & Relationship-Based)

Soft skills influence how your VA interacts with other stakeholders, including clients, vendors, and team members.

The most essential soft skills include:

• Communication & Stakeholder Management: Exceptional VAs are great communicators, capable of providing clear updates, asking thoughtful questions, managing expectations, and ensuring a smooth flow of information across teams without creating silos. They should also know how to manage confidential information, including company secrets and stakeholders’ personal information.
• Prioritization & Independent Decision-Making: Elite VAs know how to evaluate and prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance to your executive goals. This includes making independent decisions on how to adjust your calendar or manage stakeholder expectations without your direct involvement.
• Reliability & Follow-Through: A reliable VA proves their dependability by maintaining consistency in the way they execute tasks. For example, they establish systems that ensure no tasks slip through the cracks, communicate proactively, and maintain accountability.
• Adaptability & Problem-Solving: A strong VA can adapt quickly to changes in the business environment without escalating every obstacle to the executive. Instead, they identify solutions, evaluate options, and take appropriate action, only involving you in issues that require your direct intervention.

Virtual Assistant Hard Skills (Technical & Execution-Based)

Hard skills refer to the technical proficiency your VA needs to execute their tasks effectively and efficiently.

The most important technical skills include:

• Calendar & Email Management: Calendar and inbox management go beyond scheduling meetings and replying to emails. Your VA should understand how to get your email inbox under control, including sorting messages based on the topic or recipient.
• Document Organization & Information Management: VAs frequently manage files, contracts, reports, meeting notes, and policy papers. They develop an organizational system that makes files easy to find and retrieve, even when working remotely.
• Financial Management and Expense Tracking: Your VA works with finance on reporting cycles by undertaking tasks such as invoice processing, expense reporting, budget tracking, vendor coordination, and payment monitoring. Such financial administration skills help organizations maintain documentation accuracy while ensuring executives are not constantly involved in routine financial tasks.
• Project Management & Workflow Creation: Strong VAs leverage their project management skills to develop workflows and standard operating procedures (SOPs) that transform tasks into predictable items on their daily checklists.
• Technical Tool Proficiency: An experienced VA is proficient with a wide range of software platforms and executive assistant tools, such as project management tools, communication tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

What Separates Strong Virtual Assistants From Average Ones

Virtual Assistants do not always contribute at the same level. Some VAs only provide administrative support, such as data entry and research, while others take on more strategic input, including task prioritization to multiply your performance.

Below are ways in which strong VAs distinguish themselves from average ones:

• Proactive Anticipation: Average VAs act after receiving instructions, while exceptional VAs anticipate your needs even before you make a request. Additionally, a strong VA recognizes patterns, identifies what is expected, and proactively prepares solutions.
• Building Systems and SOPs: Average VAs focus on basic task execution, such as data entry and scheduling. In contrast, elite VAs continuously improve processes, operational workflows, and establish repeatable systems that enhance organizational performance.
• Institutional Knowledge that Compounds Over Time: Elite VAs accumulate valuable institutional knowledge over time, such as stakeholder preferences, recurring challenges, historical decisions, and operational nuances, which they leverage to prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance.
• Catching Problems Before They Escalate: Experienced VAs can identify inconsistencies, missing information, scheduling conflicts, communication gaps, and operational gaps before they escalate. This reduces disruptions on your schedule, helping you perform at optimal levels consistently.

How to Evaluate Virtual Assistant Skills Before Hiring

While resumes are great at providing useful information to hiring personnel, they do not reveal how a candidate will perform once they are given the support role. Therefore, it is advisable to have more effective evaluation methods in place to ensure you hire the right talent.

Below are practical methods to help you onboard the right VA:

• Review Work Samples to Assess their Judgment: Request candidates to present samples of their previous work so that you can review their communication style, SOPs, project tracking abilities, and organizational systems.
• Conduct Trial Projects That Simulate Realistic Conditions: Implement short trial projects to evaluate each EA’s performance, such as their execution quality, communication style, problem-solving ability, and attention to detail. Examples of projects they can do include inbox triage exercises, scheduling challenges, research assignments, and workflow creation tasks.
• Ask Scenario-Based Questions: Ask candidates to describe how they would navigate specific situations, such as competing priorities, difficult stakeholders, confidential information, and unexpected challenges, to assess their judgment, accountability, and independence of thought.
• Conduct Reference Checks: Many companies perform reference checks to only confirm that the listed employer employed the candidate. However, it is advisable to go further and ask detailed questions about the candidate’s reliability, communication, judgment, adaptability, and discretion.

When Virtual Assistant Skills Stop Being Enough

It is common for organizations to outgrow basic virtual assistant support. At some point, their work becomes more strategic, time-sensitive, and dependent on business judgment, prompting a shift to an executive assistant.

The following situations may warrant integrating an executive assistant into your world:

• You Need Business Judgment: Get an executive assistant who functions like your business partner by learning about your priorities and leveraging their institutional knowledge to prioritize tasks based on how they impact your strategic goals.
• You Need To Manage Sensitive Stakeholder Relationships: As a busy executive, you can position your EA as your chief of staff, making them your primary point of contact with stakeholders. Your EA will then coordinate stakeholder relationships, ensuring they reflect positively on you.
• You Require Strategic Coordination Across Departments: Managing cross-functional projects involving multiple departments requires hands-on coordination. EAs leverage their interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and strategic advantage (proximity to the executive) to break down departmental silos, allowing seamless information flow among teams.
• You Need Integrated Support: Busy executives experience schedule bottlenecks that affect even their personal lives. An EA functions as your personal assistant and offers integrated support, including planning family vacations and breaks to help you recharge.

An executive assistant offers strategic support that you may miss when partnering with only a VA. They combine executive and personal assistance to help you become more productive, while also reclaiming your time.

At ProAssisting, we provide skilled EAs to executives who need high-quality support that surpasses the typical virtual assistant model. Our ProAssistants have backgrounds in executive assistance, project management, and operations, allowing them to build and maintain workflows to reduce operational gaps. We offer flexible support models, allowing you to utilize ⅓, ½, or ⅔ of an EA’s capacity based on your support needs.

Book a free call to explore how our ProAssistants can help you streamline your operations.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

This section answers common questions executives ask about virtual assistant skills:

What Is the Difference Between Virtual Assistant Skills and Executive Assistant Skills?

Virtual assistant skills primarily focus on handling administrative tasks with clear instructions, such as data entry, calendar management, and research.

On the other hand, executive assistant skills are geared towards providing higher-level strategic support that requires independent thinking, business judgment, and stakeholder management.

Are Soft Skills More Important Than Technical Skills for Virtual Assistants?

Yes. Soft skills are more important for VAs than technical skills when evaluating the quality of support. Most VAs can learn technical skills within a few weeks or months.

On the other hand, interpersonal traits such as communication skills, judgment, adaptability, reliability, and emotional intelligence take significantly longer to develop.

Do Virtual Assistants Need a Degree or Certification?

Virtual assistants don’t need a degree or certification.

When hiring a VA, focus on demonstrated experience, hard and soft skills, professionalism, and a verifiable track record.

What Virtual Assistant Skills Are Hardest to Teach?

The hardest VA skills to teach are often soft skills such as judgment, discretion, reliability, prioritization, communication, adaptability, and anticipation, among others.

This is because such skills are behavioral and often develop through experience.

Conclusion

Businesses that focus solely on hiring virtual assistants for their technical skills often quickly discover that VAs also need soft skills to perform optimally. You need an EA who can manage your stakeholder relationships and represent you in meetings, while reflecting positively on your executive position.

The best EAs anticipate needs, manage priorities independently, maintain trust and confidentiality, and operate within a business context.

At ProAssisting, we partner busy executives with EAs who have at least 5 years of experience supporting busy C-suites at companies like Victoria’s Secret, WNBA, and Target. We screen EA candidates thoroughly, including their work experience, resulting in less than 5% of applicants qualifying for the ProAssistant role, which helps guarantee that you receive high-quality, strategic support.

Schedule a call to discuss how an executive assistant with the right skills can support you effectively.