Our fourth webinar ‘DigiTips’ focused on digital tips to help you and your team execute flawlessly in a virtual environment.

We were joined by Vickie Sokol Evans, who shared the essential digital skills every Assistant needs to know when using Office 365 in a virtual environment.

Vickie is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, specialising in Microsoft productivity platform for both PC & Mac. She travels the globe as a sought-after international speaker and has worked with major brands including Microsoft, Starbucks, MasterCard, The Gates Foundation, and most notably, Bill Gates’s Team.  

If you weren’t able to make it, you can watch the video here, and below are the key takeaways from the webinar.

We’ll be hosting weekly webinars on various subjects which are impacting our clients and candidates – details of the events will be on both our LinkedIn page and my LinkedIn profile, so make sure you’re following us for the latest updates!

Given the new working reality, there is an accelerated need to improve our digital skills: 

KEY TAKEAWAY #1 – Be tech-savvy 💻📱 

Employers will now expect Assistants to be very tech-savvy. However, often there’s no description on what this means! Luckily, Vickie has created a document showing what it means to be The Tech-Savvy Assistant (there are descriptions for each skill in the document).

KEY TAKEAWAY #2: Moving to the Cloud ☁️

(For more detail, go to 15:11 on the webinar)

It’s now absolutely essential to move everything from your local drives/desktop to the Cloud (OneDrive), and to save all future docs to the Cloud. If your laptop were to break, you would lose everything saved on it. The OneDrive app is available on your phone, so you can access and share docs with your team on any device at any time.

KEY TAKEAWAY #3: Understand the communication options 💻📱💬

(For more detail, go to 18:54 on the webinar)

During this time, you need to be able to communicate from any device at any time, so having the appropriate apps installed (e.g. MS Teams) and synced will make your life easier. It’s also important to have different channels of communication for different occasions, especially given that we’re currently being bombarded over email. Why not use MS Teams whereby you can use ‘chat’ for questions and conversations, as well as be able to hold VCs and be able to download documents from Sharepoint. Having all your comms in one place will massively help efficiency! 

KEY TAKEAWAY #4: FindTime 🔎📆

(for more detail, go to 35:44 on the webinar)

FindTime (MS’s version of Doodle) is the easiest way for you to get consensus on when you and your team can “meet”. Rather than sending multiple emails to all parties trying to find a suitable date/time, you simple poll everyone and as soon as there’s an agreed date/time, it will automatically put an invite in everyone’s calendar saving you a lot of time. #gamechanger

KEY TAKEAWAY #5: 1-click conference calls 👆📲

(for more detail, go to 47:26 on the webinar)

There is a new (easy) way for joining conference calls. Rather than dialing in, and then looking for and adding your password to join the call, there is a ‘1-click for mobile users’ option saving you precious minutes. When creating a meeting link, ensure there is a ‘,,,’ in the invite.

If you want more digital tips (I know I do!), and to connect with Vickie, you can do so here. Vickie is hosting many more webinars to help increase your digital skills, confidence & marketability – you can read more and sign up for them here.