Filipinos are increasingly typing questions about how to become a virtual assistant, a shift that has pushed the online support role past medicine at the top of a new ranking of the country’s most sought-after occupations. The finding comes from a Remitly study that tracked how often people in 145 countries searched Google using phrases like “how to be a…” and “how to become a…” across 424 different jobs between May 2025 and May 2026.
Talent consultant and HR expert Crissy Rollan cautioned that curiosity expressed through a search bar should not be mistaken for firm career intent. “The biggest thing for me here, when people type on Google the how-to, how to become somebody, it’s not necessarily a definitive route to, ‘I want to be this kind of person,'” she said.
What she finds telling is the mix itself. Roles like virtual assistant, vlogger, content creator and social media manager now sit beside long-established professions such as medicine and law—evidence, she argued, of how much the workplace has been reshaped. Several of these jobs barely existed when older Filipinos were mapping out their futures. “You cannot ignore that maybe 3-4 out of the 10 are jobs that we didn’t even know before,” she said. “And now we know.”
Rollan believes the deeper story is about motivation rather than any single occupation winning out. People, she suggested, are weighing work against the lives they hope to build. “I don’t think it is much about whether do you want to be a VA versus a doctor,” she said. “To me the biggest insight here … is that are people now considering jobs not primarily based on ‘ito yung gusto ko’ or ‘ito yung pangarap ko’ but rather people are now considering the work that they will do that will suffice or supplement and support the way of life that they have pictured for themselves.”
That represents a departure from how earlier generations approached the question, when a respectable career meant a credential and a clearly marked route to it. “Anak, kailangan maging professional ka. Kailangan, kumuha ka ng licensure exam kasi yan yung magbibigay sayo ng path para maging professional ka,” she recalled. The boundaries of what counts as a professional path have widened considerably since then, she said, as technology rewrote the nature of work.
The rest of the Philippine list reflects that blend of old and new: doctor in second, trailed by vlogger, lawyer, actor, astronaut, flight attendant, diplomat, content creator and social media manager. It marks a reversal from 2024, when medicine held first place.
For Rollan, numbers like these carry a message employers should not brush aside. If so many Filipinos are drawn to virtual assistance, she said, businesses ought to interrogate why. “What is it about a VA function or a role that makes the Filipinos want to be a VA? And how can we then apply those things?” she said. “Because that’s data. That’s data for a business owner. That’s data for an HR. You cannot ignore the data.”
The technology sector’s churn showed up in the global figures too, with prompt engineer, AI specialist and machine learning engineer drawing enough searches to appear in the rankings for the first time. Rollan sees that as unsurprising for anyone tracking the industry’s pace. “If you’re in tech, you cannot deny that dati hardware lang, ngayon software na. Ngayon, may AI pa. If hindi ka talaga nage-evolve, mapapag-iwanan ka talaga,” she said.
