Professionals needed in medical assistant field

If you enjoy working with others, can think on your feet and want to work in a growing industry, than the medical assistant profession could be the right fit for you.

“Healthcare will continue to grow fastest and provide some of the best paying jobs in the nation,” reported the Huffington Post in citing a recent report. “But the people in these jobs will increasingly require higher levels of education to enter the field and continuous certification once they are in.”

The same is true for medical assistants who are needed with relevant training from respected schools like A Technical College.

“With demand for health care growing at a rate twice that of the national economy, the industry is on track to create 5.6 million new jobs by 2020, according to a new study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and Workforce,” the Huffington Post added. “That’s a lot of jobs, but the increased demand likely won’t help America’s most vulnerable job seekers. Many of the new jobs will require advanced degrees and continued certifications. And while the industry will create some low-skill and low-paying jobs, the path from one track to the other is ‘virtually nonexistent,’ according to the report.”

There is a growing demand for medical professionals with advanced degrees. But there is also a need for medical assistants with training from a school like A Technical College, where the necessary training can be completed in a matter of months.

If you need more convincing that the medical field is on pace to be the nation’s larges job creator, check out these figures from Huffington Post:

  •    Americans spent $2.6 trillion on healthcare in 2010 — ten times more than in 1980. That revenue boost has, in turn, driven job growth; the health care industry last year created more than 540,000 jobs in Michigan alone, making it the largest private employer in the state, according to the Detroit News. The trend holds true at the national level too, with the health care industry remaining one of the few reliant drivers of job growth in the aftermath of the financial crisis, according to The New York Times.
  • Many of the healthcare jobs of the future will be concentrated among highly-educated workers. More than 80 percent of the new jobs will require postsecondary education and training, the Georgetown study found.
  • The occupation poised to grow the most is nursing, but those jobs will increasingly require an advanced degree, boosting the likelihood that potential nurses from poor and minority backgrounds won’t be able to enter the field. The nursing field will grow by 26 percent between now and 2020, but that still won’t allow for enough nurses to meet demand — there will be an 800,000 nurse shortfall, the study found. “Increasingly, a bachelor’s degree is going to be a minimum requirement,” the study’s authors wrote. “The only question is whether new nurses need it their first day on the job, or whether they can acquire some basic occupational skills and continue their education while working — a model that might help poor and minority students move into the field.”
  • There is some hope for low-skilled job seekers, though. After nursing, the field experiencing the most growth is healthcare support occupations, according to the study. Workers in health care support typically make less than $30,000 per year, not a lot, but more than what they would normally make given their skill set.

The healthcare industry is the fastest growing job sector in America. Despite the fact that many industries continue to struggle with hiring and growth, the health care industry is hiring jobseekers in droves and it is one of the reasons why so many people are looking to enter this field.

Like many industries, the healthcare sector is hard to enter without the right kind of training. That includes the medical assistant field where employers are looking for workers with training in a variety of medical tasks ranging from clinical to administrative.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the medical assistant field will grow by 31 percent over the next decade and other labor experts say it could be much larger. The reality is the healthcare industry is offering stable employment during a hard economic time, and for those with professional training as a medical assistant this is the perfect time to launch a new career in the healthcare field.

With training from A Technical College students can complete a flexible training program in a matter of months. Working as a medical assistant is one of the best ways to enter the growing healthcare industry without having to complete costly training that could take years. Working as a medical assistant offers the opportunity to work with patients and benefit from the growth of the healthcare industry, but the amount of training required is much less than becoming a nurse or doctor.