24 Nov 2025 · 7 min
John Jonas argues that cheap Filipino VA training courses set up both employers and applicants for failure by overstating what beginners can do. He recommends employers verify skills with portfolios or tests, use honest job titles, and invest in real onboarding instead of hiring someone who claims to be ready.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with the ofs that you hired. The online Filipino specialist. This is episode 100. VA training is not a substitute for actual training. My 17 year old daughter just took the ACT, which is a standardized test here in the U.S. which yuck. And as she did it I thought like, you know, this is really interesting. High school doesn't really prepare you to get a job. It prepares you to take a standardized test so that you can have more school, which also doesn't prepare you to get a job. It prepares you to take another standardized test like the LSAT or the MCAT or something like that. High school and college in the US don't really give you skills to work a job. Now, I'm not saying they're not valuable, because they are. They teach you how to think, they teach you how to be social, they teach you how to interact with people, they teach you how to work the system. At least that's what I teach my kids through high school is look, learn how to work the system. Because a lot of life is about learning how to work the system. Schooling prepares you to learn what you actually need to learn. I get all that, but it still doesn't. You don't leave school with any skills. And the same thing is true in the Philippines with not only their high school and college. When you graduate from college in the Philippines, you're a newbie, you don't know anything, but also with VA courses. So I've seen this over the years and you may have seen this on onlinejobs, ph, someone, a worker bragging about their VA training certificates like they took this course and they're all ready to be a really great va. And so you interview them and you give them a test task, expecting that they're going to do really well with it. And then they don't and they don't really know what they're doing because they're actually a beginner. A lot of these courses, most of them in fact don't really prepare them. And the reason I know that some of you are experiencing this is because you're the ones who comment on my social media and say, oh, Filipinos are low skilled and they don't know what they're doing and they overestimate their skills, which is true some of the time. And I know you guys comment that on my social media because my, my ofs tell me that you do not, because I see it myself. But so when you make that comment I understand where you're coming from. When I started onlinejobs ph in 20089 being a VA wasn't really a thing then. There just wasn't. It wasn't normal, it wasn't mainstream. Yet today it's mainstream. And since then we have seen these VA training programs proliferate across the Philippines. They're everywhere. They're being sold to people. They, a lot of them, most of them are just garbage. Like they promise you're going to get a high paying job and it's going to be super easy and they teach them very little and they let them go. A lot of them use like guarantees or pictures of houses or cars or, or boats or whatever to sell. The people in the Philippines on buying their training course with promises of making tons of money. And they're really taking advantage of people in the Philippines who are desperate for work trying to sell them their course, telling them it's easy to get a job, which it's not. So if you're watching this video, check this out. Look at this screenshot here. This is thumbnail of a popular YouTube video in the Philippines that's promoting easy jobs. Like it says you can earn 5,000 php, which is about US$100 and it says data entry and research and one day of work. And it's for beginners, for students and for people with no experience. Well that's not true. Like you're not going to make $15 an hour in the Philippines online doing data entry and research with no experience as a student or a beginner. Like nothing about that is correct. But it's a super compelling headline that brings people in and they want to watch the video. And then it sells his crappy training course. So ads like this are widespread in the Philippines. They sell this dirt cheap training to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines. Then those people come to onlinejobs ph create their profile, think they're qualified, start applying for jobs, realize they're not qualified. And often they don't realize they're not qualified until they either don't get responses to their job applications because you don't want them working for you, which I understand. Or they get reprimanded by an employer who's like yeah, you don't know anything. And they thought they were super qualified because the video told them they were going to be. I understand why they're doing what they're doing. It doesn't make it right or good or helpful. So how do you solve this? Well one, when you have a job that is for something that's not data entry. Don't post a job post. That's for data entry. A lot of these people come in expecting to find a data entry job. That's it, data entry. If your job involves data entry, but you want someone to do other stuff, don't post a job title of data entry. So that's number one, number two, and I'm going to talk more about this in coming days. In the Philippines on the job training is like critical. It's expected, it's part of their culture and it will seriously help you manage expectations of the workers that you're, that you're hiring. It will help them do quality work. It will help them understand your expectations. So you should not assume a VA is trained unless you verified it like there's a portfolio that you've seen or you've seen them do some specific work or you verified with their previous employer or you know that you're going to train them, which is, that's what I do. Like, I know that when I hire someone, regardless of how skilled they are, regardless of how trained they are, they're still like the way that we do things, which is probably different than the way that someone else does. I'm going to give that training, I'm going to give them some onboarding and training into my business. Now there are certainly ways that things are done on the Internet and I'm actually close to rolling out a training program that is trainings that we have created over the years to bring someone into the business and get them started working on something like marketing or SEO or something like that where, yeah, here's this training that we've created. You can take it, give it to your new VA that you've hired, bring them up to speed, get them really knowledgeable on the topic and give them your onboarding. And now you're like, like, good to go, right? So I'm really close to rolling this out and making it available, which I've never done before. These trainings that, that we've created over the years to bring ofs in and I expect this will be like really helpful to a lot of people to help them onboard new people without having to create the training yourself. Over the coming episodes, I'm going to talk about this training and, and what it is and why it's important and how you can get it.
