Clients and employers need employees and virtual assistants who are problem solvers. As a virtual assistant or office professional, you need the ability to identify and solve problems before they reach critical stages.
What are Problem Solving Skills
Problem solving is recognizing a problem exists and devising and implementing a plan of action to resolve it. There will inevitably be a time when something may go wrong and your client or boss will expect you to come up with a solution to resolve it.
Problem solving doesn’t have to be a big headache where you feel like you’re ready to pull your hair out any minute. Just following a few techniques on how to solve problems is a good starting point and these techniques can really help. We may not realize it but many of the tasks we perform each day involves some problem solving ability. It can be as simple as canceling and rescheduling appointments to completely re-designing an office filing system.
In today’s fast paced environment, the virtual assistant and office professional is expected to demonstrate how to solve problems as they arise each day. Problem solving, however, requires critical thinking skills that, when applied, can help solve problems in a more efficient manner.
Today’s employers seek candidates with critical thinking skills more than ever before. It has become a necessary skill in the success and profitability of organizations. Many scholars, scientists, engineers and students have used critical thinking skills to solve some of the most biggest and complex problems in the world so as you can see, it is a very valuable soft skill to acquire.
What are Critical Thinking Skills
Critical thinking skills are the ability to call on your prior knowledge and experience to analyze and interpret a situation and make reasonable judgments and decisions. If you develop the ability to think critically, it will benefit you throughout your whole life, both professionally and personally.
Whether you’re working as a virtual assistant or an office professional, you’ll most likely will be using your problem solving and critical thinking skills to perform research assignments to gather information about a variety of subjects for your clients or boss. Therefore, excellent research skills are required for keeping up with the ever changing trends in your industry. Keep in mind that not all information on the web is credible so knowing how to evaluate a website will require all your critical thinking skills.
Clients who hire VAs are overwhelmed with tasks they must complete to grow their business, and the last thing they need is to be consulted on tasks they are paying you to do. Therefore, one way to get going on your problem solving and critical thinking skills is whenever you come across a business problem, instead of just complaining and brushing it aside, come up with suggestions on how to fix/improve the issue and discuss the options with your client. This requires you to do your own research and put some thought into ways the problem could be solved. Some good resources to get going and help you solve problems are:
- Google Search – It’s important that you learn how to search the internet using Google Search to look for support that’s available for you on a particular product or service by typing in keywords and queries that may help you fix the issue.
- ChatGPT – Don’t rule out using ChatGPT and AI by providing a clear and specific problem description. Don’t be afraid to ask for step by step instructions according to GodofPrompt.ai.
- YouTube is another great place to look for videos containing solutions to common problems. Look for solutions to solve the problem and put procedures in place to prevent it from happening again.
- Help/Support – If you aren’t successful with Google or YouTube, visit the help or support areas of a product or service to find a solution. Many companies will provide a chat option where you can consult with their tech support staff.
- Forums – Know how to register for forums and look in forums for information that is available to you.,
- Evaluating web sources – Once you’ve found your sources, you can evaluate them for credibility by using this link.
- Being Creative – Being creative and thinking outside of the box will be a real value add to your career. Often times, many of us don’t think that we are creative but we actually are or can be. Creativity doesn’t mean you need to come up with the next big idea but often comes in many different forms such as learning new tools, understanding communication styles and brainstorming new ideas on how to do things..
If you can’t find an answer anywhere, step away from it for a while and the solution may come to you eventually. Don’t get bogged down by spending a large chunk of time on a problem and not getting anything else done.
Five Steps to Solving Problems
In it’s most simplest form, most experts agree that problem solving using critical thinking can be broken down into the following five steps:
- Define the problem – Take time to recognize and define the problem clearly. If the problem is not properly defined, it is difficult to move forward to finding the best approach.
- Explore possible solutions– There are often many ways to solve a problem so exploring all possible solutions is key. The goal is to create a list of possible solutions to choose from. This is the time to brainstorm with other employees to find out what ideas they have to solving the problem. Ideally come up with several different options to evaluate.
- Evaluate and pick a solution – Discuss the pros and cons of each solution and select the best one. Document all the benefits to the solution and possible obstacles you may encounter along the way then select the best solution among the choices.
- Implement the solution – Once a decision is made, it should be executed. Depending on the size of the problem to be solved, this may require setting goals and working on a team.
- Review the results – It’s important to re-evaluate the plan at some point after it has been executed to see how well it’s working and whether the problem has actually been solved.
Problem Solving Skills Examples
Problem – The Company needs a new Electronic Filing System
- Define the problem – The company needs a new electronic filing system.
- Explore possible solutions:
- We need to Identify four possible electronic filing systems
- Identify benefits and highlight potential obstacles of each system
- We need to determine what types of documents that will need to be supported
- We need a central repository, on-premise or in the cloud system, without wasting space and resources handling confusing duplicates and continually recreating information.
- Evaluate and pick a solution.
- M-Files is a good solution
- Implement the Solution :
- Identify team members and their roles
- Identify expected goals and outcomes
- Develop a timeline for the implementation plan and re-evaluation plan
- Review the results
- Has the new electronic filing system freed up time in the day for employees to focus on other duties?
- Are employees using the new electronic filing system efficiently?
In addition to soft skills, you may be interested in Hard Skills for the Administrative Assistant.
Author Bio: Dawn Bieser is the Founder, Instructor and Virtual Office Professional with OfficeSkills.org. Dawn has been teaching office skills for over two decades, both in the classroom and on her website, officeskills.org. She enjoys using her skills in education and technology to help individuals improve their effectiveness and efficiency and gain new skills. You can find more about her on her About page
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