MTF Institute Research Team | Evidence checked 5 October 2026

The full research report is archived at Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23171566. Download the eight-page report PDF.

Abstract

This report examines what public vacancies ask people doing virtual and remote administrative assistance to do in three separately analysed work locations: the United States, the United Kingdom and the Philippines. The unit is one distinct current requisition, not one employee, employer, client, application or training customer. The matrix-bound evidence checked on 5 October 2026 contains 40 U.S.-eligible, seven U.K.-eligible and 53 Philippines-eligible requisitions with current role-specific application routes. These are three country-specific structured purposive samples, totalling 100 distinct role-level requisitions under the stated screening and deduplication rules; the country denominators remain separate for every work-area count. The study does not estimate national vacancy totals, the proportion of employers requiring a skill, growth, pay, placement odds or the value of a credential. Counts from unlike countries are never combined into a prevalence rate.

Across the stronger U.S. and Philippine core/general-administration strata, employers describe a connected operating task: receive requests, establish priority and authority, coordinate calendars and messages, maintain documents or records, track follow-up, and communicate what remains open. Some postings add travel, customer contact, spreadsheets, CRM records, expense administration or project coordination. The U.K. evidence is much smaller and contains no independently verified core Virtual Assistant posting; it illustrates a few remote general-administration and experienced executive-support roles rather than a U.K. beginner profile. In every country, title alone is a poor guide to authority or seniority. A posting may call a role “assistant” while asking for years of executive support, client management or specialist work. The analysis therefore keeps core virtual assistance, general remote administration and executive progression separate, and treats unstated details as unknown.

Question, geography and unit of observation

The research question is: Which duties, work products, capabilities, tools, interfaces and decision boundaries are expressly described in current, accessible virtual-assistant and substantively related remote administrative vacancies in each of the three countries? Collection initially began with a U.S. stratum and was later expanded prospectively to U.K. and Philippine strata. The U.S. sample was not retrospectively recast as a planned three-country frame. Each country keeps its own inclusion decision, denominator, source context and limitation. A role serving a U.S. client from the Philippines belongs to the Philippine worker-location sample; the client's country does not change worker eligibility. A worldwide-remote listing without a supported worker country is not automatically assigned to any of these strata.

A requisition is a dated statement of hiring intent. It may combine regular work, occasional projects, aspirations, required criteria and preferences. It does not prove the employer already runs the process well, how much time a worker spends on a task, the final authority of the worker, or the outcome of any recruitment. “Current” means an individual detail page and a role-specific application route were visible at the stated check. It does not guarantee that the page will remain open. Login following a clearly matched open requisition can still be a role-level route; a generic talent pool, search card, disavowed form, broken redirect or stale indexed result cannot.

The principal scope is remote work with general administrative substance: inbox and correspondence support, scheduling, meeting preparation and follow-up, records, documents, task tracking, client communication or related operational coordination. Executive-assistant positions with more complex leadership, discretion or travel duties are retained only as an explicitly separate progression stratum. Legal, medical, insurance, finance or marketing specialist duties do not become generic virtual-assistant requirements merely because an advertisement uses the word “assistant.” Role-specific regulatory or licensed work was excluded from the ordinary role frame. The study uses original paraphrases and short necessary source anchors, not copied vacancy descriptions.

Search, screening and coding method

Searches combined Virtual Assistant, General Virtual Assistant, Administrative Assistant, Remote Administrator, Team Assistant, Personal Assistant, Executive Assistant and related work titles with country and remote-location terms. Search engines and job boards were discovery routes, not automatic evidence. A requisition entered the study set only after an exact individual employer, intermediary or job-board detail was opened and screened for role tasks, identifiable posting source, country-worker eligibility, remote status and a role-specific Apply path. Direct employer ATS pages were preferred when available. LinkedIn, Indeed and OnlineJobs.ph records were kept with their source-family labels and limitations. Where an intermediary named a distinct client or described a concrete client assignment, multiple requisitions could be retained; identical or near-identical employer, client, title and job text were deduplicated. Country-specific candidate, exclusion and hold logs retain closed pages, mismatches, ambiguous geography, generic pools and access barriers.

Every retained role was coded, where the public description stated it, for responsibilities, expected outputs, hard methods, observable behavioural skills, tools and systems, education and experience, required versus preferred criteria, level and seniority, daily/weekly/monthly or event-driven cadence, interfaces, decisions and escalation. An unstated field was coded not disclosed, not “not required.” A source's heading or general employer boilerplate was not promoted into a job-specific criterion. Codes can overlap: one posting may mention scheduling, records and customer communication. Any future count of such codes needs a named country, role stratum, numerator, disclosed-field denominator and date. It cannot be read as a national skill rate.

The U.S. integration screened 329 distinct canonical individual URLs or job IDs across logged source partitions before final role decisions, with repeat memberships and cross-board mirrors reconciled. This is a count of screened source addresses, not of U.S. jobs. The separate U.K. searches and Philippine searches document their own queries and exclusions; the absence of a published national vacancy register and rapid closure of listings prevent a census claim. The U.S. strict sample has 40 requisitions, below the original U.S.-only 100-vacancy target despite broad lawful screening. Its larger source funnel includes indexed pages that had closed and remote-tagged jobs without U.S. worker eligibility. The separately approved international design adds two country strata for distinct comparative evidence; their rows do not erase the U.S. shortfall or become U.S. observations.

Composition of the country samples

Country and worker location Current requisitions Core VA General remote administration Executive progression Source and interpretation limit
United States 40 9 12 19 Direct employer ATS, Indeed, LinkedIn, Wellfound and intermediaries. Core-labelled experienced roles are not a beginner proxy.
United Kingdom 7 0 3 4 A thin general-administration and senior executive comparator; no observed core VA role.
Philippines 53 10 26 17 Includes 18 Assist World and six RemoteVA requisitions, each a correlated intermediary cluster; blocked roles are excluded.

These study denominators are bound to matrix SHA-256 e19834398b0a47cfbc7fefac3e839529d0a6ccee6a00a73ca6b43191f0e3845c. The table is a scope and role-composition description, not a combined international prevalence distribution. The U.K. cell is small and senior-skewed; it cannot validate a beginner VA curriculum for the U.K. The Philippine sample includes substantial intermediary concentration: excluding Assist World leaves 35 requisitions; excluding both Assist World and RemoteVA leaves 29. These are sensitivity checks, not estimates of unique employer policies. The U.S. sample has more employer-source variety but also multiple postings from assistant services. None of the samples is random or representative.

Source families differ by country. United States: 10 Indeed individual detail, 5 LinkedIn employer-labelled, 1 Wellfound employer-labelled, 23 direct employer/ATS, 1 staffing/marketplace authored. United Kingdom: 1 LinkedIn intermediary individual, 5 direct employer/ATS, 1 staffing/intermediary ATS. Philippines: 19 Indeed individual detail, 1 JobStreet individual, 6 OnlineJobs.ph individual, 1 direct employer/ATS, 26 staffing/intermediary ATS. These are source counts within the selected samples, not employer shares. Ten U.S. and 51 Philippine screened roles remain held outside these denominators; the held JobStreet group is particularly large because exact pages could not be reread through its security check.

Across the Philippine sample, calendar/scheduling, correspondence, records and task follow-through remain described after removing both large intermediary clusters. Their counts and levels change, and no source-cluster result implies a national rate. A hidden-client or undated duplicate cannot be ruled out with a distinct URL alone. The conservative screening log excludes source pages that could not establish independent current demand. The VA4U property-and-sales role is one experienced, sector-specific administrative observation; its required Eagle and prior Australian real-estate experience are not beginner or universal requirements.

Duty disclosure within core and general-administration strata

The table below counts only core VA and general remote-administration requisitions; executive progression is excluded. Each cell is the number of selected requisitions whose exact role text disclosed the coded work area, over that country's core/general study denominator. Codes overlap. A missing mention is unknown, not a negative statement about the workplace. The U.K. denominator of three is too small for a meaningful frequency inference. The U.S. core label includes some experienced support roles, so this is not an entry-level skills-rate table.

Stated work area United States (n=21) United Kingdom (n=3) Philippines (n=36)
Documents and records 16 3 31
Calendar and scheduling 16 2 25
Task or project follow-through 10 3 27
Correspondence 11 2 26
Meetings and action records 8 2 5
Spreadsheets or reporting 11 2 13

These are within-sample disclosure counts from the accepted coding matrix, not national rates. They cannot be added across countries. Travel in the U.S. full sample, for example, is strongly associated with executive progression and should not be taught as universal beginner work.

Work described by the postings

Request intake and follow-through. The most transferable source-grounded work is to turn a message or assignment into a clear next action. Public roles describe monitoring shared or delegated inboxes, sorting routine enquiries, clarifying deadlines, tracking owners and following up until the work is resolved. A completed work product may be a reviewed draft reply, a request log or an accurate status update. Some positions ask the assistant to answer routine questions; others refer to approval before an external message. Public advertisements often leave the boundary unspecified, so the job description cannot supply a universal permission to send or decide. The country samples support teaching a clarification-and-approval habit as a professional method, not claiming every employer has the same policy.

Calendar and meeting coordination. Suitable roles in the U.S. and Philippine strata commonly describe scheduling, availability, invitations, agendas, meeting materials, notes and action follow-up. The small U.K. sample also gives concrete examples of diary and meeting support, including senior executive contexts. The practical output is a coherent meeting record: right people, correct local time, working link, prepared materials, decisions, owners and dates. A posting that says “manage calendars” does not disclose delegation rights, privacy settings or approval rules. Current Google Calendar changes are analysed separately in the international current-changes article; product release and vacancy requirements are different evidence.

Documents, records and routine systems. Vacancies describe creating or formatting documents, maintaining digital files and spreadsheets, updating contact or CRM records, preparing reports and checking completeness. These outputs need a source, owner, date, access level and quality review. Some roles involve expenses, invoices or travel arrangements. That is administrative handling, not authority to approve a payment or provide financial advice. A few examples take place in healthcare, legal, insurance or other sensitive settings; only the general coordination task transfers to this study. The employer's trained process and qualified specialist retain decisions outside the assistant's assigned scope.

Communication and observable behaviour. Job descriptions value clear written updates, organization, accuracy, discretion, prioritization, follow-through and adaptability. Those words become meaningful only as observable acts: confirming receipt, identifying what is missing, checking names and dates, raising an exception before a deadline, keeping a document retrievable, and reporting status without implying work is finished. Senior executive postings often add anticipation, high-trust access and independent handling of competing principals. The latter is progression evidence; it should not be sold as the entry requirement for a learner taking a first remote administrative role.

Tools and AI. Descriptions name email and calendar systems, office documents and spreadsheets, video meetings, cloud files, task trackers, CRMs and occasionally expense or client systems. A vendor name in one posting is not a universal tool requirement. Several executive progression postings mention AI-supported process work or automation, but the vacancy sample cannot establish profession-wide adoption or measured productivity gains. AI use should be taught as bounded assistance: use only authorised or synthetic inputs, inspect the generated output against the source record, correct errors and obtain the relevant human approval before a real message, record or calendar change. This is an educational control derived from the observed work risks and separately dated product context, not a claim that all three countries follow one regulation.

Levels, interfaces and decision boundaries

The three role strata answer different questions. Core VA and general remote administration describe routine support work that an early-career learner can practise with a clear brief, templates, checks and supervision. Executive progression postings often require years of prior support, discretion with leader information, complex multi-person scheduling, travel, board or event logistics, proactive systems improvement and sometimes delegated expense or client contact. The progression stratum demonstrates a pathway, not a promise that a beginner is ready to perform every senior duty after one course.

Interfaces disclosed in roles include clients or customers, managers and executives, operations or project colleagues, vendors, finance or people teams and external meeting participants. A vacancy may ask someone to “own” a process or relationship; that does not establish final legal, fiscal, employment or business approval. Many postings do not describe escalation explicitly. Where the public text is silent, the correct research result is unknown. A worker should clarify the local authority map and record a handoff; the public vacancy alone cannot establish employer decision rights. Separate country occupational context—BLS in the U.S., the U.K. National Careers Service/ONS classification, and Philippine TESDA or DICT material—can explain a role category or training pathway, not fill missing fields in an individual requisition or create a cross-country standard.

Geography coherence, rights and limitations

The U.S. evidence speaks to U.S.-eligible remote roles, sometimes limited to particular states or time zones. The U.K. evidence is restricted to seven named postings, with British-national, commuting, office-training, night-shift or other role-specific conditions. The Philippine evidence includes Philippine-resident remote service roles, some serving clients abroad. A client's location does not determine worker geography. Country-specific law, training standards or government initiatives are not transferred into another jurisdiction. The U.K. sample cannot support a claim about U.K. core VA skill frequency. No worldwide prevalence estimate follows from these samples.

Source access is another material limit. Search ranking, indexing, ATS JavaScript rendering, job-board authentication and rapid closure shaped the observed set. A large group of JobStreet Philippine records was visible during collection but blocked from independent current read-back by the site's security verification; those records were held, not counted. Several U.S. Indeed or LinkedIn pages were closed, contradicted their remote label, or lacked explicit U.S. worker eligibility on reread. Some intermediary adverts did not disclose the hiring client, creating residual mirror risk even after job-ID and description comparison. Source-family sensitivity therefore accompanies the results, and any conclusion about common role tasks should survive excluding the largest intermediary cluster. The report records only URLs, coded facts and brief excerpts; it does not reproduce vacancy prose, personal applicant data, provider logos, paid templates or proprietary competency standards.

The U.S. BLS occupational profile notes that some administrative assistants work from home as virtual assistants, but its broad administrative category is not a Virtual Assistant headcount. The U.K. National Careers Service profile and ONS occupational classification describe wider administrative/personal-assistant work, not remote VA demand. TESDA's Philippine Virtual Assistant Services description is local training context, not proof employers require that credential or that MTF uses its protected materials. These sources inform interpretation; the vacancy ledgers, not occupational totals or training pages, control every within-sample observation.

Conclusion

The defensible result is a set of observed remote-administration tasks, outputs and boundaries, not a universal job description. The stronger U.S. and Philippine core/general samples give practical evidence for request intake, scheduling, records, correspondence, task follow-through and quality checking. The U.K. sample shows a few general administrative and experienced executive examples; it does not validate a beginner U.K. VA profile. The role's value in these public descriptions lies in reliable coordination: make the request clear, preserve the source, organise the work, follow it through, communicate accurately and escalate decisions outside assigned authority. These bounded work situations provide a practical basis for professional learning while employer rules, jurisdiction-specific obligations and specialist judgments remain with the people who own them.

Source roster

The individual current requisitions selected for the study matrix are listed below. Employers or intermediaries may close or change a vacancy after the 5 October 2026 check. This roster is neither a count of distinct employers nor a cross-country prevalence denominator. Exact source, coding and disposition provenance are preserved in the matrix bound to the hash above.

United States

United Kingdom

Philippines