As an allied health professional, your days are spent investing your expertise, energy, and compassion in the lives of the patients you serve through your clinical or administrative skills. Each interaction and task throughout your day is an opportunity to ensure that the patients you care for feel the commitment you have to your chosen career and to their experience.
We are passionate about keeping our materials and certifications relevant and meaningful to help empower allied health professionals reach their career goals. Before we made the recent updates to NHA's Certified Patient Care Technician/Assistant (CPCT/A) exam, we spoke to employers and current patient care technicians, and would like to share some of the information and insights we discovered. Knowledge is power, and we hope this information will help you — whether you're currently working in healthcare or aspire to one day!
How does an arrangement where you have the opportunity to get paid while also learning career-advancing skills sound to you? Too good to be true? Well it’s not.
Putting in the time, effort and resources to earn an NHA certification can say something about your character and your capabilities. But how do you let people (especially hiring managers) know about your hard work and meaningful achievement?
We put together some tips to help you talk about your certification — both on your resume and in an interview — to empower you to make the most of your NHA certification.
When the Alabama Department of Education set out to improve their CTE programming, they started with research, gaining insights from business and industry to determine what employers are looking for or lacking in potential candidates.
“We want to make sure that students who exit secondary career tech programs are actually prepared with skills that are going to help them get employed,” says Collie Wells, Interim Deputy State Superintendent of Education, Career and Technical Education/Workforce Development Division. “We started having lots of conversations with business and industry throughout the state to find out, ‘What do you really need from potential employees? What are you missing? What are they lacking?’”
The wild success of a new program piloted by LaGuardia Community College and its partners — NYC Department of Small Business Services and the Washington Heights Workforce1 Career Center — is catching the attention of employers, students and medical assistant education programs throughout the country.
A total of 40 immigrant New Yorkers graduated from LaGuardia’s first English Language Learners Medical Assistant Training Program* with an astounding 100% pass rate on not just one, but three NHA exams — for medical assisting, phlebotomy and EKG.
There's a growing demand for frontline healthcare workers. To date, NHA has awarded over 750,000 certifications to allied health professionals. Empowering professionals through the power of certification is at the heart of our mission, and we regularly conduct industry research to ensure the content and exams we provide to current and future certification holders are relevant and keep up with trends.
Recently, we looked at the current state of the EKG technician profession — and what's to come in the future. During this research, we surveyed and interviewed working EKG technicians across the country. Here's a what we learned from them.
NHA recently hosted a roundtable discussion with allied health educators and one of the largest employers of medical assistants in the United States. We discovered opportunities to work more closely, share information and create a network to support allied health students becoming employed professionals faster — and with the right sets of skills.
Not only was it a great learning experience for everyone who attended, but there were some takeaways we wanted to make sure we passed on to our certification holders, candidates and educators across the country. Below are some themes we uncovered at our most recent employer-educator summit.
You worked hard, earned your certification and started your new career in healthcare. Congrats! Your dedication speaks volumes about your character.
But there's still room to grow. (There's always room to grow.) And if you want to level-up your career, the best person to consult is yourself. Yes, YOU!
“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.” - Aldous Huxley
Taking time to reflect on your work performance — especially in regards to "soft skills" — can help you identify areas for improvement and give you a solid foundation for achieving your professional goals.
So, where do you start?
Oftentimes, people don't give honest feedback because they're too "nice" and fear they'll hurt our feelings.
Or, they'll give us honest feedback but our natural response is to be defensive. (We have some tips for that here.)
But if you really want to level-up your healthcare career, you need honest, insightful feedback from the people you work with every day.