Estate & Manor Magazine – Household Staff and Luxury Lifestyle Services The #1 Online Magazine and Confidential Recruitment Resource for Private Household Staff and Global Luxury Lifestyle Services.
Related Articles
Looking at various job boards and domestic employment agencies who specialise in the placement of professional private staff, you’ll find that the demand for Personal Assistants and Private PAs is extremely high with many advertising for talent in areas such as London, New York, Los Angeles and other areas with a high proportion of wealthy individuals and families
Some people have are under the impression that a Personal Assistant and a modern day Butler are quite similar in the way they work and serve their principal.
So I just want to briefly outline what makes the roles different, but also how personal assistant training from educational providers with a clear foothold and influence in the private staffing sector can help you transition into or become a personal assistant
Many professionals with transferable skills, or those already working in the private staffing space in other capacities are becoming more and more interested in working as a personal assistant within a private household, the salary is generally very good in comparison to similar roles within the industry, sometimes on par with Estate Managers and the most elite of butlers.
What’s the difference between a Personal Assistant and a Butler
Some professions are very closely related. What is the difference between a personal assistant and a butler for example? There are three similarities. First the job itself. What is a Personal Assistant, what is a butler?
The fact that you ask this question is because it is not clear for many people. If we are completely honest, we have to admit there is a very grey zone.
Maybe we should state what a Personal Assistant is not. Firstly, a Personal Assistant is not a butler… as a Personal Assistant there are a number of hands on tasks you wouldn’t perform for your clients that a butler would.
The best way to illustrate it, is that a Personal Assistant leans much more towards the business side of the principal and the butler towards the household of the family.
Traits of a quality Personal Assistant or Private PA
The most important thing a Personal Assistant should be, is a trustworthy person for his principal; his client if you will. Secondly, they work in in the fast paced World of people either on their way to the top or those already achieving massive amounts of success.
Their wits, their perseverance and organisational talents will be tested daily. Both Personal Assistants and butlers should be well-trained in a big variety of skills, such as organising events, diary management, business travel and of course be tech savvy.
Third, they are both in very high demand. It’s why there is now a huge surge in the amount of online butler courses and personal assistant training for UHNW families.
After this ‘exceptional’ year 2020, high net worth families value their time even more than before the global pandemic and the battle for talent is well and truly on.
It seems like everyone is aware of the fact that we need to be prepared and the skills of a Personal Assistant or butler can come in very handy.
How to Train To Become a Personal Assistant (or celebrity assistant)
There is just no way you can start your job as a Personal Assistant or butler and not stay up to date. The world is changing too fast. Hence, the need for training.
Our School for Butlers & Hospitality took it upon themselves to invest heavily during the COVID pandemic to release their finest personal assistant course yet. A fast paced training without the unnecessary content, straight to the point but highly engaging.
You will learn everything from buying the right equipment, organising meetings and events, time management, personal shopping, delivering powerful presentations and setting up your home office to delivering amazing service and finding the right job wherever you want to work.
How to get a job as a private personal assistant?
Typically, to become a personal assistant in the private staffing sector, you should have a skills which are easily transferable – this is a good starting point.
Being a personal assistant involves a lot more than things such as diary management, booking and arranging vacations and the like. You’re basically tasked with the smooth running of your principal’s entire existence.
If you have the aforementioned transferable skills and also have completed an brick and mortar or online personal assistant course, you have an extremely good chance of an interview invitation where you will then be able to demonstrate your candidature at a much more personable level.
There are many private staffing agencies and job boards which advertise such positions on a weekly (if not daily) basis, so there is definitely no shortage of opportunities.
It really pays to invest in your skills and keep them current to make you a much more alluring proposition for an employer
Is it worth investing in online personal assistant training
I think for anyone wishing to enter the ‘private staffing world’ working for those of extraordinary wealth, it definitely pays to invest in your candidature, especially for employers who are only really looking to hire the most savvy and committed individuals.
Luckily, there are a few options which enable you to not only train with elite private staffing training providers who have been there, and done it all, but also with the possible connections for these positions around the World.
The School For Butlers & Hospitality are one of the elite training providers and with the huge success of their online butler training programme, they have also released a distance learning personal assistant course which covers 12 modules ranging from actually becoming a personal assistant, through to working for celebrities and VIPs.
Due to the low entry price and the ease of learning (as it is a completely online course), it affords people more flexibility when it comes to investing in their personal assistant career.
If you want to learn from the very best, transform your job prospects and the way you approach this industry, we recommend you at least take a look at this online personal assistant course to see if it could offer you the knowledge, guidance and job assistance you need to have a very successful career as a personal assistant.
