Healthcare work is both personally and financially rewarding. Many healthcare careers feature solidly middle-class salaries in the upper five-figure to early six-figure range.
At least just as importantly, they allow people to dedicate their lives to tasks that they find genuinely fulfilling.
Historically speaking, healthcare careers have been inaccessible to some people for financial or logistical reasons. While this is by no means an issue that has been permanently solved, it has been amended by more flexible learning formats.
In this article, we take a look at why a healthcare career is more achievable now than ever before.
How Many Ways Can You Get a Healthcare Career?
Naturally, it depends on the position itself. The path to becoming a doctor is still long, winding, and difficult. Finding work as an administrator can be equally time and money-prohibitive.
On the other hand, for nurses, it has never been easier to find an educational pathway that makes sense for you.
In the next few headings, we take a look at unique options that you may want to take advantage of.
Accelerated Programs
Accelerated Programs are an ideal option for people who have already established themselves as professionals but are looking for a rewarding pivot into a healthcare career.
They’re available for nursing students who already have a bachelor’s degree but have not completed any of the nursing certification steps. Accelerated Programs give you an entire nursing education in 12 to 18 months, allowing you to get licensed very quickly.
Obviously, the trade-off is that you’re working in an extremely fast-paced learning environment in which your education is almost like a full-time job.
If you have a college degree but can’t quite commit to training at that velocity, there is another option in the form of a certification-only program, which allows you, as a college graduate, to pick off credits one at a time, specific only to nursing. In this way, you at least spare yourself the need to worry about gen-eds that aren’t even related to healthcare education.
This path is essentially characterized by ongoing college courses and can take as long as you want. It won’t be as fast as an accelerated program, but it will be more comfortable for people who are balancing many different responsibilities.
Online Learning Options
Online learning makes healthcare education considerably more flexible. For one thing, it gives you the ability to choose from essentially any program in the country, whereas without online learning, you would be limited to places you could drive to or required to relocate for your degree. Online learning brings healthcare education to you.
There are different formats within this method of education. For example, some online programs meet essentially like physical classes, but with the requirement of meeting virtually instead of in person. You have designated lecture times. You collaborate with other students. You’re just never in the same room as them.
Others use a flexible pre-recorded format that is even more accessible to people who, for example, hold down a day job or are raising a family.
Online learning for nursing degrees does have its limitations. You’ll still be required to do clinical rotations, but at the end of the day, this is an option that works well for a wide range of people.
Direct-to-Hire Programs
Direct-to-Hire Programs provide a truncated path toward higher learning. In this degree format, you’re able to work consecutively on undergraduate and graduate studies.
In a Direct-to-Hire Program, an aspiring nurse could get their undergraduate and graduate degree in five years. There are even programs for people who already have a degree that allow you to get a nursing license and an MSN over two to three years.
Direct-to-Hire Programs serve as a sort of career accelerator. Nurse practitioners, for example, earn twice what RNs do.
What Is the Fastest Way to Become a Pharmacist?
Pharmacists also have education acceleration options. While you cannot shorten your time to completion to quite the extent that nurses can because a doctorate-level degree is required, there are programs that can be completed actually quite quickly.
Many even take into account the need that most people will have to supplement their existing gen-eds to meet program requirements. For example, the University of Findlay has 16-week programs designed to allow incoming students to complete all required prerequisite work.
The timeline for completion will depend on where you’re at educationally speaking. For a high school graduate, for example, the minimum time is over six years. On the other hand, if you already have a college degree, you can shorten that down to two to three years. For this time, you can make over $100,000 doing rewarding and impactful work.
Conclusion
Healthcare careers are not easy to get, no matter the context, but with the right program, you can shorten your completion time and work on your studies in a format that makes sense for you.
At the end of the day, though, speed in education does not beat everything. What you really want is comprehension. The goal should be to find a program that maximizes your likelihood of successfully completing all of the requirements.
Flexibility isn’t just about getting the job you want as quickly as possible. It’s about figuring out which formula best suits your skill set and tapping into it.
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