Part 1 – Wendy’s Journey
While we’ve spent a lot of time explaining our business, we thought it was a good time to get personal with the outstanding people behind Outsourcing Angel, our VAs.
Over the next [few weeks], one of our amazing Angels, Wendy, is going to walk us through all different things about her own journey, the kinds of things she’s learnt throughout her career, and what she’s found to be important to succeed as a Virtual Assistant.
The first part of our series will be all about Wendy’s journey, from a bright-eyed university student studying something she didn’t have a passion for, to a successful, and most importantly, happy Virtual Assistant.
Everything began in 2006 when I decided to take leave from uni to look for work. At the time, I was studying BS Agricultural Engineering and was shy of 98 course units before graduation.
I was never into designing reaping machines and mills, or computing the gauge of metal that would give certain machines the best support for its maximum load. I was never into computing how much lighting a hatchery needed to produce a certain number of chicks at a certain production period.
What I was passionate about was literature, language, and linguistics. Anything that involved stories, writing, or reading. I’ll talk about chasing your passion in more detail next time, but for now how it fits into my story is that I took that one piece of knowledge about myself and ran with it.
I set off into the real world to look for a job knowing one thing – I can write. I can seriously write about anything.
So I got my first job as a copywriter and survived my training course. To my surprise, I got a score of 98% in my evaluation and was assigned team leader after earning our certificates and I realised, I can do this! Everything was great at the company that I found myself at for more than 2 years, but when they decided to move to the city, I was torn about chasing them or being left behind. But by then I was a single mum, and there was no way I could uproot my son with a snap of my fingers.
Luckily, my friend introduced me to freelance copywriting and a few gigs kept me financially afloat for the following years. I worked with clients in the US and UK, for their PR and SEO articles as well as writing content.
When I earned enough, I also jumped back into uni – this time studying and finishing my degree in English Literature.
After that, it became a journey of pushing myself and taking on challenges to take myself further than I could’ve imagined. I was introduced to the idea of Virtual Assistants and soon found myself applying to and working at an Aussie-based digital marketing company. And then another.
To be honest, I started off at the marketing company with a “fake it ‘til you make it” approach. I didn’t know anything about data mining, website mapping, business citations, or website health checks. But I spent the extra hours learning and pushed myself every time I received an unfamiliar task. There were all kinds of hurdles but instead of backing down, I did the work and now I’m in a position to even work on performance and productivity reports for other VAs within the company.
Telling this story quickly like this makes it sound as though everything came to me on a silver platter, but I started off being paid just $1.50 for articles over 500 words long. Everything came one step at a time, but not without me having to chase chances. For every business I worked with, I constantly strived to grow and transform.
This was just an introduction to my career path, and I look forward to sharing some of the important things I’ve learnt over the years that can help others grow themselves.
