In this podcast episode, the host outlines 34 distinct roles that virtual assistants (VAs) in the Philippines can effectively fill for businesses, grouping them into three overarching categories: (1) expected executive and administrative tasks such as calendaring, email management, travel planning, data entry, transcription, customer support, and lead generation; (2) specialized marketing, creative, financial, compliance, and technical roles including social media management, copywriting, SEO, paid advertising, content writing, audio/video editing, graphic/UI design, bookkeeping, accounting, HIPAA‑compliant medical assistance, programming, web development, and e‑commerce platform management; (3) niche or “weird” roles that are surprisingly well‑suited to Filipino VAs, such as real‑estate support, sales/closer work, tutoring, grant writing, architecture/engineering, legal/paralegal assistance, and project management. The host attributes the Philippines’ suitability to cultural factors—high English proficiency, a strong respect for authority (high power‑distance), and a service‑oriented mindset—while also noting limitations: VAs may struggle with ambiguous project‑management expectations, voice‑over work due to accent, and high‑level strategic planning. The episode concludes with a practical recommendation to source talent via the onlinejobs.ph platform.
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34 tasks you can easily outsource to a virtual assistant in the Philippines. And this video is specific to the Philippines because there is a unique culture there that makes them especially suited to these tasks. Now it's not that you can't get these things done elsewhere in the world, it's that the Philippines is especially suited well to these things. So I'm going to break these 34 tasks down into three different categories. Number one, things you would expect them to be good at. Number two, more specialized skills that you may not have thought of. And then weird things that they're really good at that you wouldn't think of. Last thing, before I get into the actual tasks, I actually don't want to talk about tasks. I want to talk about roles that they can be good at. A task is like edit this photo for me. But the role would be a graphic designer. So I'm actually have 34 roles that people in the Philippines are going to be really good at. Within those roles you're going to find hundreds of tasks that they could do easily for you. So let's get into it. The first set of roles that virtual assistants in the Philippines are good at are the things you would expect like virtual assistant or executive assistant or executive virtual assistant, whatever you want to call it. This is like calendaring or email or travel planning or booking or dealing with everyday things. Filipinos are just really good at this. Taking things off of your plate, things that you don't want to do. This is a super easy one to hire for. Then a few others, data entry and research. You would expect them to be good at that. I mean this is just really following instructions. Next transcription. Then customer support. And customer support would include like technical support and phone support. They're very good at both of those. And a big reason is because English is a primary language in the Philippines. So anybody you're going to find is going to speak English and they're probably going to speak really, really good English and American English and that's a really big deal. Another one you would expect them to be good at is lead generation. And whether that be just following a process that you're giving them or it's going to LinkedIn and contacting potential clients or maybe following up with your leads to pre qualify them before handing them off to you or gathering a list of emails that you're going to market to whatever it is, Filipinos are generally really good at doing lead generation. So those are a few of the things that you would expect them to be good at. Now let's get into some of these more specialty skills that maybe you haven't thought of or you wouldn't associate this with a va, a virtual assistant. And the reality is, as I go through this list, you're going to think, well, that's not really a virtual assistant. That's a social media marketer or a programmer. And you're right, that's not a virtual assistant. If you were to hire that person locally, you wouldn't say, oh, hey, hey, Mark, this is my virtual assistant. When the reality is, no, this is a bookkeeper or an accountant or a programmer. So just because they're in the Philippines doesn't mean they're a virtual assistant, even though we like to use that word. So let's get into some of these things. So the first set of roles here would fall under the marketing category. And this includes they're really good at social media. So social media management, which would be like a strategy thing or implementing posts that are being made, or post planning or responding to comments. Social media management. And then there's social media marketing. They're actually really good at like creating posts. And this is more of a storytelling and a design kind of thing where, yeah, they can create the social media posts and then do the management of it. The next two kind of go together, which would be email marketing and copywriting. And copywriting would include sales copywriting. So for email marketing, that would include writing newsletters, managing the newsletters, responding to people who are responding to your newsletters, all kinds of things within newsletters and copywriting. Yeah, I mean, maybe this is something that you hadn't considered before, but you can hire someone in the Philippines to write sales copy for your website and they're actually pretty good at it. The next two are really important ones in high demand things. SEO and ads. SEO, Yep. There are tons of people in the Philippines who are really well versed at SEO. Along with that, there are also tons of people who are really good at ads. So Google Ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads, whatever the type of ads you want, you can definitely find someone in the Philippines who is very skilled at this, has a lot of experience, is probably doing it for other US customers or customers in the UK or Canada or wherever. And they understand the process, they understand the platforms, they'll quickly understand your customers and know how to run these ads. I personally have multiple people in the Philippines who run ads for me. They run Facebook ads, they run Google Ads, they run LinkedIn ads, they run Yahoo ads, they run ads through affiliates and in newsletters they're actually pretty good at it. I also personally have people who do SEO. I have people that do social media marketing, creating the content. I have people that do social media management, and I have copywriters. So I personally have all of these things that I'm talking about and they run those entire areas of my company. There isn't someone in the US Overseeing them. So then since we're talking about copywriting, the next category of roles that you can find people in the Philippines that are really good at would be content creation. So this would include writing like blogging or newsletters I already talked about, or writing social media posts. Writing content for your website. Filipinos are really good at writing. You can find creative writers, you can find technical writers. You can find any type of specific writing you want done. You can find someone in the Philippines who is good at it and can be creative with it and can follow processes. Next under content creation would be like audio and video editing. So like for a podcast or for a YouTube channel. Super easy to find virtual assistants in the Philippines who are really good at video editing and audio editing. I personally have people that write content for me. They write blog posts, they write scripts for videos, and then I have someone else that edits the videos. He also edits them into podcast episodes. This that you're watching or listening to right now. All I did was record and someone in the Philippines actually prepped for this and someone else in the Philippines, a different virtual assistant, if that's what you want to call it, is editing the video and editing out my audio hiccups and turning it into a really professional product, which then leads into the next role that they're really good at in the Philippines is graphic design. Now my, one of my video editors I have multiple, actually is also a really good graphic designer. And so within the graphic design role, you can find multiple different skill sets that would include like web design or user interface design, or user experience design or app design, or even like CAD drawing or drafting. You can easily find virtual assistants in the Philippines who are good at any one of these things. You're probably not going to find someone who's good at all of them. But yeah, super easy to find these people. So the next kind of category of roles would be financial roles. So bookkeeper, accounting, financial analyst. There's a really interesting situation in the Philippines that makes them especially suited to these roles. The Philippines is very high on the power distance index, which means they really respect authority. So when they're given a set of rules like you can't share this with anybody or you have to be really careful with this information. They're very careful with that, probably much more so than someone in the US So when given your books to manage, they're going to be very respectful and very careful with your information, which makes them especially well suited to doing bookkeeping or accounting or analyzing financial information, financial reports. And I see people hiring people in the Philippines all the time for these roles. Now this also leads me into the next thing which would be HIPAA compliance. Filipinos are especially good at maintaining privacy because of their respect for authority. So like medical transcription or medical assistance or medical billing, transcribing or formatting doctor notes or following up with patients or scheduling appointments with patients, all of these things. A virtual assistant in the Philippines can easily do these things. They're very good at it, they're very well suited toward it. And there are a lot of people with a lot of experience already that you can hire them and hit the ground running. All right. The next category of roles that people in the Philippines are really good at is development or programming. So within this you can find like web developers or PHP or Python or C or C Sharp or Visual Basic, basically any sort of skill or really any web development or programming language that you're looking for. There are lots of people in the Philippines who are well educated and have a lot of experience in this. Just as an example, I have six full time people that work for me that work all across our front end and our back end programming. Some of those people have like 20 years of experience in programming. Super, super senior level people and they're working together. Super easy to find. I recently recruited another programmer and had to choose between four different people with between 15 and 20 years of experience. Most people don't really consider the Philippines as a highly technical oriented country, but it really is that they're very highly educated and a lot of their universities are turning out programmers. And then with turning out programmers it also comes with like iOS developers or Android developers. You can also easily find game developers or other sub programming roles like quality assurance or people familiar with APIs. So programming roles, check. Yes. And again, I personally have people doing every single one of these things that I listed except for game development because I don't have any games now. On the less technical side of web development you have web builders and now this is things like Shopify or Wix, WordPress or Go High level or click funnels. There are thousands of people that are easily accessible at onlinejobs physical with skills in each of these things. And along with web builders, we have e commerce platforms which would again include Shopify, but also Amazon and Amazon, FBA or WooCommerce, eBay, Magento, Etsy, Squarespace. I have seen people with years of experience in each of these fields at onlinejobs.ph you can find thousands of people with years of experience at any of these platforms. So regardless of which platform you're on, yes, you can definitely find a virtual assistant in the Philippines who's experienced at it, who's good at it. They're creative, they are thinkers. Yeah, they can definitely help your e commerce business. Alright, the third set of roles are weird things that you wouldn't maybe expect them to be good at, but they are. And again, there's some interesting cultural things going on in the Philippines that that makes this work. So first, real estate virtual assistants in the Philippines they actually have the Realtor brand which means they understand real estate how you do. So whether you're an investor or you're a realtor or you're supporting real estate business, yeah, you can find someone who's very familiar with it and very experienced with it and that goes all the way from like listing homes to analyzing properties to generating leads or even closing deals. I've seen people in the Philippines doing all of these things or which then leads me to the next thing that you maybe wouldn't think they're good at, but they are is sales. And this includes closers inbound or outbound sales, telemarketing, appointment setters, cold callers. Yeah, I personally didn't expect to find the culture of the Philippines supporting salespeople, but I see it all the time. I've seen thousands of profiles of Filipinos who say they are cold callers, they're appointment setters, their outbound sales or inbound sales. And I see businesses using virtual assistants in the Philippines for sales roles all the time. Alright, next, and this is another weird one is tutoring. So Filipinos are especially good at English tutoring and math tutoring and not that they're not good at other types of tutoring, but you wouldn't have thought about hiring a Filipino to be a tutor yet. They do it all the time. They teach English to people in Korea all the time. They get hired as math tutors doing online tutoring all the time. They're really good at it. A couple other odd ones include grant writing or architecture or engineering. Yep, there's universities in the Philippines are turning out architects and engineers or other technical types of roles. Also lots of lawyers and lots of lawyers looking for work. I personally, my brother is an attorney and has an attorney in the Philippines working for him. I know someone else who they have a team of lawyers in the Filipinos. They call them their paralegals because legally they're not allowed to offer legal advice in the US because they haven't passed the bar. But they said they're just as good as our lawyers. And the last odd one, maybe not so odd, is project management. Now, that leads me into the things they're not so good at, which is project management now. Okay, so I said they're really good at. And I said they're not so good at it. Well, here's the situation. Filipinos tend to be shy is what they call it. And if you put them in a role where they're not sure of your expectations or if they're not sure of what what should be happening, though, they're not very good at that. And so what I've often seen is someone brings in someone to manage a project and doesn't give them a background in the project or understanding of the project or explanation or training. And their managing of the project doesn't work so well, or at least they're not managing it the way that you want it managed. So I have multiple people on my team managing projects. They're pretty dang good at it. They don't necessarily do it exactly the way that I want to, although generally they're pretty close because they've worked with me. And that's the key there is in hiring a project manager. You have to set the expectations really well or have them working for you for a while, which will obviously set the expectations pretty well. The next thing they're not so good at is voiceover. The Philippines, they're really good at English, but they have a slight accent. So if you're doing voiceover for us clients, not the best option. They next setting the company direction or setting a sales strategy. While Filipinos are really good at doing sales or lead generation for sales, they're not the best at setting the strategy for it. You can definitely find people, it's a little bit harder. And the reason being there, they're just in a different culture. And while they'll definitely grow to understand your customers and your customers or your clients, if they're setting the strategy for your business, culturally, there's a disconnect there. So in all of this, what I hope to have conveyed is the Philippines is a very well educated and highly intelligent culture. They're also very pleasing by nature and really want to do a good job for you and so really you can find virtual assistants in the Philippines who are good at it and will do it for you. You want to know where to find these people onlinejobs Ph.
