How to Be Successful in the Healthcare Field

The healthcare field can be exhausting and cutthroat at times. If you want to be successful in your career, you can’t just hope and pray that things work out. You need a plan for advancement.

5 Tips for Advancing

The healthcare industry is broad and diverse. And while each niche has its own special path, there are some general tactics that apply across the board. Here are several of them:

• Find a Mentor

The problem for most younger healthcare professionals is that they don’t know what they don’t know. In other words, it’s impossible to fully grasp what lies ahead in your career when you’ve never actually been there. Having a mentor is like having a cheat code that allows you to look ahead and learn from someone’s successes and failures.

When searching for a mentor, you want someone who is knowledgeable, strategic, creative, inspiring, and an effective communicator. They should be the sort of person you want to be in 10 or 15 years.

While there are formal groups that help foster mentor-mentee relationships within the healthcare field, the best partnerships happen organically. Find someone you respect and ask them out to lunch to pick their brain. Do this regularly and it’ll eventually morph into a mentorship relationship – even if you never say the word out loud.

• Never Stop Learning

Education doesn’t stop with a college degree or certification. You have to adopt a posture of continued learning. This includes both formal learning (more on that below) and informal learning.

Informal learning is the learning that you expose yourself to on a daily basis. This includes podcasts, books, and even conversations with coworkers and peers in your industry. You should always be acquiring industry knowledge/skills and personal soft skills (like listening, empathy, etc.).

• Prioritize CEUs

The best way to get formal education is to take challenging continuing education (CEU) courses that apply to your niche or field. If you’re a respiratory therapist, this means taking respiratory CEUs on topics like medical ethics, lung diseases, asthma, etc.

The benefit of CEUs is that they equip you with very specific skills and knowledge. We recommend identifying weaknesses or areas of your industry that you don’t understand and taking classes as a way of strengthening your knowledge.

• Spend Time With the Right People

If you want to acquire a certain skill or change your personality, the quickest and most natural way to do this is by spending time with people who possess those traits.

“When it comes to relationships, we are greatly influenced — whether we like it or not — by those closest to us. It affects our way of thinking, our self-esteem, and our decisions,” Business Insider reports. “Of course, everyone is their own person, but research has shown that we’re more affected by our environment than we think.”

If you’re surrounded by positive people who are hungry to learn, you’ll also become more optimistic and ambitious (as it relates to your own development). On the flip side, if you spend time around negative people who are fine settling for average, you’ll do the same.

Be mindful of the company you keep. This might be the most important piece of advice in this entire article.

• Find Work-Life Balance

All work and no play is sure to make you dull and restless. This will eventually evolve into burnout, which could threaten your career and push you into another field. One of the keys to avoiding burnout and finding success is to prioritize proper work-life balance.

Optimal work-life balance will look different for everyone; however, it’s all about prioritizing your time. You need to block out time on your weekly calendar for personal obligations, responsibilities, and relaxation.

Be Your Own Advocate

As a healthcare professional, you spend most of your time advocating for others. And when it comes to your career, you must also advocate for yourself. Truth be told, very few other people will. (That’s just the nature of the business.)

It’s not enough to put in the time and hope things work out. While there’s certainly something to be said for patience, you have to use your time wisely (particularly early on in your career). Through mentorship, continuing education, networking, and proper work-life balance, you’ll eventually carve out a successful spot in this field.