Just like any other profession, the virtual assistant has its own rich and colorful history to boast and share to the world. Its beginnings started from secretarial services during the forties; in fact it would be safe to call secretarial services as the mother of virtual assistance.

However, throughout the course of its own history, virtual assistance strives to create a distinction from its “mother” making it a separate profession yet belonging to the same umbrella category. Collectively they are called administrative professionals.

From their separation, thence, virtual assistance has grown and advanced further until now and has become the global preference of businessmen, not only a fad but a growing standard in its own right! This is the birth of a profession that became a worldwide phenomenon and permanently changed the world’s view on business outsourcing.

Early Beginnings: Secretarial Services

• It all begun in shorthand, when Sir Isaac Pitman in the early 1800 invented the shorthand method and founded the first school for secretarial services.
• In the year 1942, the National Secretaries Association was born. It was founded in order to foster professionalism among secretaries in the US.
• It was in 1952 that a special day called “Secretaries Day” was created which later in the year 2000 changed to “Administrative Professionals Week”. The move was made in order to recognize all individuals working in the field with different title names.

The Birth of Virtual Assistance

• The term “virtual assistant” was born in 1996. It commenced from a simple conversation between Anastacia Brice and life coach Thomas Leonard when the latter coined the term while having phone conversation with the former. With the idea already in Brice mind, she borrowed the term to name the new emerging profession. And in the next year, she witnessed how the profession was formalized. It was in February of 1997 that the event happened when Anastacia Brice opened the first organization for virtual assistants called the AssistU. The organization still in to being up to now. The succeeding years until today witness many more developments in this profession. In 1999, international virtual assistants association was formed in order to respond to the growing number of people involving in the business and just like any organization it will help represent the profession to the world.

Virtual assistance has grown and departed from the bosom of its mother profession and created upon itself a unique distinction that marked its identity to the world. From being simply a sub-category of secretarial services, it equaled the profession, and yet later surpassed it in measures beyond what the mother profession could offer.

Today, the work of a virtual assistant is getting more in demand in the business world as more businessmen prefer the services of virtual assistants than hiring a personal secretary for two economic reasons: hiring a virtual assistant is cost effective, and efficiency of work is more possibly achieved. Contact Your Work Assistant for information on how we can help you!