A Virtual Assistant (VA) is an independent professional who provides all the services an office based secretary or administrator can provide for example typing, administration, research, transcription, marketing and social media but remotely. I first began working as a VA in 2020 as a way supporting myself financially through a twelve month unpaid sabbatical, while completing the Honours year of my degree and when I was made redundant 12 months later, I decided to keep going with the work I had started.
History
There is some dispute over who exactly invented the phrase virtual assistant but sometime in the 1990’s appears to be the agreed date. Author of the 2-Second Commute Chris Durst is credited with having founded the virtual assistant industry in rural Connecticut in 1995 and in 1999, she went on to co-found the International Virtual Assistants Association, serving as its first president. However in 1992 Stacey Brice was already working as a virtual assistant when her life coaching client, Thomas Leonard, coined the phrase ‘virtual assistant’ for her. She then went on to create AssistU, a virtual assistant training programme.
In 1999 the International Association of Virtual Assistants was set up to provide advice and training for virtual assistants based in the UK and around the world. The Alliance of UK Virtual Assistants, a free directory of VAs in the UK followed in 2000. In 2003 The Virtual Assistant Coaching and Training Company set up its first UK specific VA training and also in 2003 Tawnya Sutherland founded VA Networking, the largest organisation of virtual assistants worldwide. In 2005 The Society of Virtual Assistants, originally known as The UK Association of Virtual Assistants, was founded by seven Scottish virtual assistants. You can learn about what a VA does today, in the short film below.
In the 1800’s Sir Isaac Pitman, invented Pitman shorthand and founded the first school for secretarial services. The school only admitted men, as women were not allowed in workplaces, however, with the invention of the typewriter, early technology paved the way for women’s entry into the profession and women went on to occupy office jobs and perform secretarial work. Historian Anna Davin records that when the British civil service took over operating telegraph and postal offices in the 1870s, female clerks were sought for their typing speed and dexterity, with the official in charge saying the wages ‘which will draw male operators from but an inferior class of the community, will draw female operators from a superior class.’ Women were favoured too because they could spell and type better, would raise the tone of the office, then marry and leave without requiring pensions. By the 1930s, men had disappeared from the industry and the role of secretary became a female one from then on.
The word secretary originally meant ‘one entrusted with the secrets or confidences of a superior’ and is derived from the Medieval Latin ‘secretarius’. The Online Etymology Dictionary records the word was first recorded circa 1400 meaning a ‘person who keeps records, write letters, etc.,’ originally for a king. In the 1590’s the word referred to the title of ministers presiding over executive departments of state. The word is also used in both French and English to mean ‘a private desk’ or ‘secretaire’ in French, while the term ‘secretary bird’ refers to the bird found in sub-Saharan Africa, with a crest, which when smooth, resembles a pen stuck over the ear.
By the 1960’s ‘training respectable girls’ to be secretaries, focused on honing the relationship between the secretary and her boss but would-be secretaries at the Lucie Clayton school were also taught the importance of deportment and makeup, along with diary management. In her article ‘A Short History of the Secretary’ Claire Phipps writing in the Guardian quotes a letter published in The Times in 1969, advising that secretaries wear deodorant; learn how to make good tea and coffee; and always look beautiful, but not provocative … changing stockings was an activity best confined to the ‘powder room’. Typing pools saw large numbers of women find employment in a strict and disciplined environment, where a room of secretaries produced endless documents from shorthand notes.
Later the telephone and fax machine helped bring people and workplaces together around the world and in the 1980’s the typewriter evolved into the word processor making document production quicker and easier. In the 1990’s the internet made the world smaller again and changed the way all people lived and worked, with the demise of the typing pool, a computer on everyone’s desk and at home, laptop computers, tablets and mobile phones for working anytime anywhere and an increase in remote working. Remote working may however have began earlier than you think, with IBM allowing five of its employees to work from home as an experiment in 1979, an experiment that by 1983 saw roughly 2,000 of its employees working from home; in the mid 1980’s the US department store J. C. Penney allowed its call centre staff to work from home; and by 2018, 70% of the worlds population was believed to work remotely at least once a week, with 55% working from home at least half the week.
In the 2015 Financial Times article ‘The case of the vanishing secretary’, Emma Jacobs wrote of the dying secretarial services industry, reporting administrative jobs were in decline, however in 2020, it was not technology but a global pandemic causing a global reset, forcing people to work at home and to find new ways of working. Up until then it was estimated office workers spent 90,000 hours of their lives at the office. Collaborative software that enables the sharing, processing and management of files, documents and more among several remote users and/or systems, allowing them to work jointly on a task or project, was suddenly in huge demand.
Since the 1800’s office work, the people who do it and how they do it has come a long way and today, yet again, the role of the office is undergoing more disruption. How this works out long term is currently much debated, however, post pandemic, as things hopefully begin to return to normal, many people, myself included, have re-assessed their lives and the things that are important to them, liking their work life balance more and are open to the opportunity for change.
Further information
- Anywhere working initiative
- International Virtual Assistants Organisation
- Ofcom: Online Nation 2021 report
- Society of Virtual Assistants
- Workstyle Revolution
Sources
- BBC: How the office was invented
- Britannica: Sir Issac Pitman
- Financial Times: The case of the vanishing secretary
- Knight Frank: A history of the office (what has and hasn’t changed)
- Merriam Webster
- National Geographic: Secretary birds
- Online etymology dictionary
- Samira Ahmed: The curse of the typing pool
- SignEasy: The history of the secretary and how admin is a job for all
- SIMFORM: Remote work survey 2021
- Society of Virtual Assistants: The history of the virtual assistant
- Sorry, I was on mute: The history of remote work (how it came to be what it is today)
- SquareFish: History of virtual assistants
- The Guardian: A short history of the secretary
- The Guardian: Typing – it’s complicated
- Toptal: The history of remote work, 1560 to present
- The Week: The rise of the virtual assistant
- TIME: A brief history of secretaries
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