Care + Career

When you're focusing on achieving your allied health career goals, it's easy to forget to refine a very important skills set — the kind that cannot be easily tested or measured: Soft skills.

Soft skills are your personal attributes that help you communicate and relate to your patients and healthcare colleagues. In a field that is focused on care, these skills are especially important as you work toward advancing in your allied health career.

Want to improve your soft skills? Here are five things to keep in mind every day on the job...

Searching for your next job is a big deal and can be an overwhelming task. If you feel like you’re not finding enough opportunities that match your skills you could be accidentally limiting your search.

Sometimes the job that lines up just right with your skills doesn’t have the exact job title that you’d expect. Because healthcare environments can all be a little different and any given position could have a unique mix of tasks, a job title could sound a little (or a lot) different than what it says on your certification.

When you see dozens or more patients in a single shift, it can be easy to forget that each patient is a person; a person who likely is feeling a lot of uncertainty and vulnerability.

We're seeing more and more allied health professionals achieving stacked credentials — meaning they're getting more than one allied health certification.

Why are they doing this?

Should you be stacking credentials?

What's the benefit to you?

Keep reading to discover why stacking credentials is a growing trend in allied health, and why maybe you should consider it, too.

Healthcare is full of acronyms - and this is one of the most important if you’re pursuing a career in modern healthcare. Find out what EHR is, why it’s important in healthcare, and how it affects you as a current or future certified healthcare professional.

What is EHR?

If you’re new to the healthcare profession, get used to hearing these three letters. EHR stands for Electronic Health Record. You might also hear EMR (Electronic Medical Record). There’s a slight difference in what each of these acronyms refers to:

Studying can seem like an overwhelming task, especially if you have a busy schedule. There’s so much information to take in in a limited amount of time, so it’s important to find study methods that work well for you.

Here are five tips to help you become a study master:

"Allied health" is a bucket term used for many frontline healthcare workers such as medical assistants, pharmacy technicians, billing & coding specialists and more. These professionals are often the first people patients encounter, and play an important role in their overall care experience. 

As a healthcare worker, you dedicate endless hours to helping others. It’s a noble job that speaks to your compassion for others. But what about you — How many hours do you spend helping yourself?

Judy O. Berry, Ed.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Tulsa, compares a person’s self-care needs to a cell phone’s battery needs. Cell phone batteries need to be recharged. You can do this at three different times:

1. When the battery is completely without power
2. When the phone is notifying you to pay attention “Low battery — please charge!"
3. Regularly recharge to always have power

It’s normal to be nervous before an interview. Almost everyone is. But with the right preparation, you can quiet your fears and set yourself up for success … And the National Healthcareer Association (NHA) wants to help you do that.

We’ve compiled a list of common healthcare interview questions and paired them with tips and example responses. As you read through the questions, consider how you’d respond based on your personal experience. Consider writing down your answers and rehearsing in front of someone you trust—or even in front of a mirror. It may feel awkward, but chances are, it’ll pay off come interview time.

You earned your certification and you’re ready to land your first allied health job. Or perhaps you’re already in the field but you’re looking to move on or move up. Getting the job is about luck, but mostly it’s the luck you create. As the Roman philosopher Seneca so famously said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” So create your own luck and follow these 10 tips to prepare for your job interview.