Justin Harrison

Virtual assistants are business owners who provide support to other business owners.  Each VA has her own set of skills, but most offer a variety of services for the convenience of their clients.  This keeps things interesting, but sometimes it also creates a need for some extra help.

Hiring an intern is a great way to grow your business as a virtual assistant.  Here are some of the many reasons why:

• Interns are inexpensive.  Internships are often unpaid, and if they do get paid the wages are less than a traditional employee.  That means that you can get the help you need at a fraction of the normal cost.  You will have to spend some time showing your intern the ropes, but if you hire one that is competent you will get more than enough of a return on your investment to make up for it.
• Interns are eager to learn new things.  The main objectives of most interns are to learn new skills and gain experience.  Most are quite motivated, and they are happy to take on new challenges.  So you can throw just about anything at them, and as long as they’ve received adequate training, they will most likely run with it.
• Having an intern around can give you the freedom to try new things.  By turning over tasks that you’re familiar with to an intern, you can work on things that you would like to learn more about.  Normally you might not have had the time to adjust to the learning curve, but with an intern working on things that you consider second nature, you might finally be able to get it figured out.
• You could learn something from your intern.  Since virtual assistance is such a broad field, no one can master every possible aspect of it.  But if your intern has worked with programs or hardware that you’re not familiar with, he might be willing to share his knowledge with you.  And you never know when that might come in handy.
• You can screen your interns to find people that you might want to work with in the future.  VAs often refer clients to one another when they do not possess the skill that someone is looking for, and a good intern might be a candidate for this type of exchange once the internship is over.  You might even find someone that you would like to hire as an employee.

A virtual assistant business is well suited to internships.  Both the VA and the intern can benefit tremendously from the arrangement.  A carefully selected intern could help you get your work done, but he could also add more to your business than you ever imagined.