John Jonas explains why Filipino virtual assistants expect formal training even when experienced: it's culturally standard in the Philippines. Employers who skip structured onboarding risk losing hires. His solution, VA's Made Easy, is a training library with role-filtered materials to help employers onboard and upskill VAs effectively.
Questions this video answers
29 modules.
Each training can include up to ~150-page PDFs or about 50 videos.
Six months free access to OnlineJobs.ph.
John Jonas.
April 14, 2022.
Chapters
How to easily provide training to your ofs. So I want to talk about some culture, some Philippine culture that we don't often talk about. So training a new employee in the Philippines is such an integrated part of their culture that they actually have an acronym for it and government backing for it. It's called OJT on the job training. And it's so prevalent that like I found a government created PDF document that is intended to businesses explaining them why they should provide on the job training, how to do it and why it's important. It's so prevalent that as I have recruited people in the Philippines for working for me, I've had applicants ask me questions like, is there OJT for this position assuming that I knew what OJT was? Or how long is the on the job training for this position? So like they're just assuming there's gonna be training once they get the job. And some of these people were really, really skilled, talented people that were asking these questions, still expecting to be trained once they got on the job. And there's a couple reasons for this. One, it helps them feel comfortable in the position. Two, it helps them know that there's ongoing support for them in the business that like, there's room to improve. So if you, if you kind of, if you don't provide training and onboarding training to your new ofs, you kind of alienate them right away because it's part of their culture. What I'm Saying isn't like 100% across the board. You don't have to fully train someone every time or you're going to lose them or you're going to offend them. That's not the case. But it is a really prevalent thing in the Philippines. So here's the problem. Creating training is hard. And I know because I've been doing this since 2005. And when I started, like I said, Joven knew nothing and the second person I hired knew very little. And I just had to create these trainings. And so I've been creating them for years and years and years. And a lot of you have said to me, like, hey, how do I create these trainings? How this is really hard? Or I don't know, I don't have the knowledge to create these trainings. How do I do this? Well, here's what we've done. We've created the trainings for you. So I'm introducing today. VA's made easy. It is done for you trainings that you can hand off to your ofs. You can hand it off to a brand new beginner ofs, you can hand it off to a new person that you hired who's super experienced. You can hand them off to people that have worked for you for years and years. And you're just giving them more training, you're upscaling them, you're helping them to progress. Regardless of who you're giving it to, it will help that person feel more comfortable in your job, contribute to your business, be more productive. I mean, they will be so thankful for the training. So I've spent the last couple of years creating trainings that are specific to the employer VA relationship. Here's the thing. So every training that I've ever seen online is intended for the CEO of the business to implement. It's so, it's so odd to me. People create a course, a training course, it's a marketing training course, it's a whatever it is. And they then talk to you, the business owner, saying, here's what you need to do. You go do this and you make this decision and you do that and you create this. And if you hand that off to an OFS in the Philippines, they will disappear. And I know this because I've done it, I've tried it. What happens is you give them something that's intended for the CEO, they don't want to be the CEO, they don't know how to be the CEO. They're scared of doing something wrong because you haven't provided them training. And so they look at this, they go through the training, they get to these, these points in there where they're expected to make decisions that they don't know how to make and then they want to disappear because they're scared. So if you're going to do something like that, you have to filter the training you give them or we've done that for you. So we've created these trainings where we've separated the CEO role from the OFS role, where they get the implementation details and the why details, but you get the decision making stuff and they, when they get decisions to make, they're told, hey, try and make this decision, but ask your boss about this so that you can confirm, yeah, hey, that's a good decision. Or you can get the relevant information from them and then, and then you can help them make a good, correct decision for it. These trainings will give your off skills, they'll give them confidence, they'll give them hope towards the future of improving and kind of climbing the ladder in your company so they can get higher pay Scale. So these trainings will give your OFS skills, they'll give your OFS confidence, they'll give them hope towards the future of potentially getting more training, they'll give them hope of expanding their career options within your company. I mean this is one of the things about the Philippines. They're so loyal that you can provide them training and they don't leave to go to another company, which is so amazing. These trainings will help set quality of work expectations. There's so much that providing training to your office does. And this is really kind of one of my secrets that I've had over the years is that I just provide so much training to people that they're super loyal, they work super hard, they are constantly trying to improve the business. They're coming to me with ideas. This is what training does for you. So here's what this done for you. Training Library vasmadeasy.com is so right now as we launch this, it's currently 29 different training modules on various topics. Topics like SEO and Facebook marketing and pay per click and LinkedIn marketing and email marketing and how to build websites, how to build effective websites. So so many different topics like how to, how to do forum marketing, which is one of the things that we do, how we do that, how do you step into forums and do that, how to build a mini net and how to have that be effective. There's so many things here. And so@vasmadeeasy.com you'll see you can find a list of all these trainings and actually of what's covered in each of these trainings so you'll know what they're learning. Each of these is designed specifically for you to download and not go through the training yourself, but to be given to your ofs. And then there's typically a one to two page thing or a couple minute video that will tell you what you need to do in order to have them be effective at this training. You'll learn what they're learning, you'll learn the decisions that you need to make and you'll. So you'll have a pretty good overview of what's going on here while they get all the details. Now if you want to go through the details also, that's totally fine. These are very comprehensive. I mean 150 page PDF or for each one of these or like 50 videos for each training. And again there's 29 of these trainings. We call this a library, a training course library. So your OFS will learn new skills. They'll come to you with questions, which is so awesome when they get the confidence to come to you and say like hey, this thing doesn't make sense or hey, what if we did this? Or hey, I think that this thing would make sense. They'll implement processes in your business. I can't explain how much providing training will affect your business, your OFS, your relationship with them. The whole thing is better. Vasmadeasy.com check it out. It's brand new. We've never done this before and plus it comes with access to OnlineJobs ph for 6 months for free. So bonus.
