More than ever in recent history, healthcare workers are regarded as the heroes of our time. They gave their time and support to our loved ones during the pandemic, working monster shifts to provide the best care possible during an unprecedented crisis. Even now that the pandemic is receding, it’s still clear that the world is in massive debt to healthcare workers, who are now highly respected globally. In this article, we’ll look at how you can join their number, using your knowledge and studies to find different entryways into this exciting industry.
Learning
A healthcare career involves a good deal of learning. That’s the case if you’re a doctor, a nurse, or a healthcare data administrator working in the back office to help hospitals deal with their patients. All of these careers require you to study to become a professional who can work responsibly with vulnerable people. But where should you start your learning journey, and how should you approach healthcare studies?
The simple answer is that you should first decide on the role you’d like in healthcare. You won’t need to go through a laborious, multi-year course in healthcare studies if you’re looking for any role in a hospital, as some are offered to those without qualifications. Let’s quickly look at the different hospital or healthcare center roles to see which might suit you best.
Finding a Role
On the sliding scale of hospital roles, some doctors and nurses must be qualified to practice at any healthcare institution. Then there are the porters, the orderlies, the cooks, and the cleaners who can work in the same institutions without formal training. These are the primary careers you’ll associate with the hospital floor, but they’re far from the only jobs in healthcare. Here’s a complete list, with some ideas on what each might entail.
- Doctor or surgeon: you’ll need to take a multiple-year course to qualify as a medic eventually. These courses are sometimes grueling, with much to learn about the human body, disease, and medicine. At the end of them, you’ll be qualified to work in any hospital worldwide.
- Nurse: a nurse also requires training. Here, you’ll need to take an undergraduate course or go straight to nursing school to improve your skills and learn how to care for patients.
- Administrator: administrators are in a hospital and behind the scenes across the whole healthcare system. They’re hugely necessary for the functioning of any healthcare system, and they’re there to ensure everyone’s well cared for. You’ll also need to have completed a course for this job.
- Orderly: these individuals do much of the heavy lifting in a hospital, ensuring patients are at the appropriate clinic or department and getting medicines and drugs from A to B. They’re essential for hospitals and often require little training to get going.
- Support staff: dozens of other support staff make hospitals run. Hospitals need receptionists, security guides, cleaners, and chefs to function perfectly. If you have one of these skills and are passionate about healthcare, you can work in a hospital too.
Now that you’ve looked over some of the roles that you might be able to assume within a hospital or healthcare center, it’s time to decide which will suit you the best. You’ll likely decide based on the time you have to study, the cost of those studies, and your career aspirations. Once you’ve made that decision, it’ll be time to prepare yourself to be eligible for whatever positions you’ve chosen.
Networking
Healthcare isn’t the kind of field in which a network is essential. If you’re qualified, you’ll usually find that healthcare institutions are keen to hire you and that you will never struggle to find a job. On the other hand, there are reasons to contact certain healthcare professionals online in the first weeks and months of your decision to enter the industry. For one, there are hundreds of people just like you who recently qualified and began working in healthcare. They’d be excellent people to ask about how that process was and for any advice they might give you.
Equally, there are probably a handful of healthcare professionals in your network. Perhaps a friend’s father is a doctor, or your university friend recently leveraged their data skills to work in the back office of hospitals as an administrator. These people are well worth contacting again for advice and support in the first grueling months when you’re putting together the skills and experience you need to get into healthcare.
Qualifications
When you search job sites for the positions you are interested in, you’ll often see that there are eligibility criteria you haven’t yet fulfilled. Sometimes it’ll be a simple case of your experience being too threadbare, leaving you needing to find an entry-level job to pick up that experience. But more often than not, you’ll be required to have specific qualifications, without which you will not even be considered for the role you’d like to apply for. While some of these might be in the use of specific software or aspect of healthcare provision, they’re usually the essential qualifications: doctor’s, nurse’s, and administrator’s training.
You can study to pick up any of these at the most eminent universities globally. You can also choose to study online, which is a massive boon for those who are a little older than their classmates and have a home, children, or a full-time job to attend to besides their studies. Getting qualifications in your chosen field isn’t easy; it’ll require you to work hard to learn new things. But the online teaching ecosystem has made it more accessible. Take the Executive Master of Health Administration online as an example – it’s a course you can take from the comfort of your living room to one day qualify to crunch the numbers that keep hospitals running.
Experience
When you’re considered for a role in healthcare, you’ll often be examined for the experience you’re bringing to bear. If you’ve not had any relevant experience for the job you’re applying for, you might find that you’re not considered a suitable candidate and that someone with more experience is preferred. As such, even before you’ve had the chance to get some studies under your belt, you need to find a job adjacent to healthcare. For instance, if you can find a job in care homes, that will impress future employers in the healthcare space.
This is not something that everyone is free to do. If you’ve chosen to change careers from your current one, you’ll likely still be working full-time, providing your income, and supporting your family. You won’t want to jump out of that into a new job unless you can maintain your financial security. Still, if possible, changing to a healthcare-adjacent career can be your first exciting taste of the new career you’ve chosen for yourself.
Books and Podcasts
Your passion for healthcare need not find any bounds. Studying alone may not be enough to satiate your love for the field, which is, after all, incredibly diverse and exciting. That’s where books and podcasts come in, which at the least, are highly intriguing or entertaining, and at best, they might even help you in your career. You can purchase healthcare books in stores or online or download them as PDFs for your computer. There’s also a growing space for healthcare podcasts on most major podcast platforms. You can listen to doctors discussing interesting cases or nurses talking about the most lovely people they have ever met on the ward.
These are great ways to build up your passion and knowledge in healthcare. You’ll be able to read on your commute or listen to podcasts while you’re out for a run, meaning you’ll be killing two birds with one stone when onboarding this information. Plus, you might discover something about healthcare that completely changes your career direction, interesting you so much that you’re keen to follow that path.
Making an Impression
When you find a job in healthcare that you’re eligible for, you should apply with all your might. Ensure your resume is sparkling and that your cover letter explains all you think you have to offer the institution you’re applying for. This isn’t a time to hold back: show off your skills and prepare yourself for an interview in which you’ll attempt to dazzle your potential future employer. Most qualified healthcare professionals are hired to open vacancies, seeing that the industry lacks professionals. Still, this stage of your career is all about making a positive first impression that’ll set the tone for your future career.
What should you bear in mind when it comes to first impressions on the job? Well, there are some obvious and important points of professionalism, such as arriving on time, being punctual to meetings, looking clean and presentable, and being kind and professional to all the people you meet. Then there are more proactive things that you can do, such as offering extra care to colleagues and patients alike, staying on an extra half-hour after a shift ends to make sure everything’s going to run smoothly, and looking to take work off the plates of stressed colleagues. All of this can endear you to your team and make you a popular new hire at the institution you’re now working at.
Career Progression
Most healthcare professionals are thrilled to make it into the sector finally. But thoughts soon refocus on where they want to go within their career. Will you, for instance, seek to achieve pay raises and promotions, or would you prefer to move slowly toward the most exciting jobs in yours? Are you motivated by money and status, in other words, or by the quality of the work you’re doing? These two motivations needn’t conflict and often go hand in hand. Just make sure you’re ready to define your career ambitions so that you know where you might want to be in five years.
Once you know where you want to get in your career, you can start setting smaller goals to help you get there. That might mean taking on more work in your target areas, looking intermittently at other opportunities in the field, or talking to managers and seniors to alert them to your ambitions and what will make your job more satisfying to you. Be aware that there’s little that you can do to push your career faster than your seniors will allow, so don’t let your ambition become a problem. Use it to guide you and to give you a sense of meaning and direction in your career.
Satisfaction
The final point in this complete guide is to enjoy the satisfaction you get when you’ve worked incredibly hard to achieve something. If you set your sights on becoming a healthcare professional many years ago, sitting back and taking in your success story to date is an essential tip for your mental health. It would be besCeleCelebratingto the next challenge. Busy and diving would be the best career, and it would be best if you could take a breather and feel proud of your achievements. So once you’re in your first healthcare job, take a moment or two to relish your journey to get to this point.
Careers in healthcare are as challenging as they are rewarding, and getting a foot in the door is often the most challenging stage of these careers. This guide maps out how to do it today or in the future.
