If you don’t want to have to worry about your
ability to find employment after college, you need to be studying the
fields of fitness, health and kinesiology. These are fields that seem
to be constantly hiring and at every skill level. It’s one of the
few fields where you don’t have to worry that a lack of experience
will keep you from getting hired. Of course, that doesn’t mean that
a job is guaranteed. If you want to guarantee employment for yourself,
here are some things you need to know and do.
Just like with every other field of study, being
well rounded is important. This is why, in addition to studying things
like nursing and sports medicine, you should be studying health information technology. This makes you employable on the administrative
side of the medical office as well as on the healing side and that could
be just the foot in the door that you need later on.
You don’t have to want
to be a doctor or a nurse to go into these fields. There are a lot of
different careers here that don’t involve needles, blood or bodily fluids. For example:
• Nutritionists
and Dieticians study
biology, health and even fitness while they are in school because they
need to know how different nutrients affect the body. These professionals
do more than help people ensure that they are eating a balanced diet.
They work with people who have issues like diabetes, heart disease,
etc to make sure that they get the nutrients they need while not adversely
exacerbating the conditions that affect their patients. They also help
athletes “bulk up” in healthy ways so that their bodies are able
to repair the damage that is done to them physically.
• Physical
Therapists help
heal people through physical means. Physical Therapists will help people
regain mobility after injuries or to maintain mobility through the course
of a serious illness. A physical therapist can help someone, for example,
learn to walk on a prosthetic leg after an amputation. They might help
someone regain motor function in an elbow and wrist after a break.
• Occupational
Therapists take
a more holistic approach to wellbeing through physicality—they help
with fine tuned motor skills as well as helping patients develop or
re-develop the skills they need to deal with everyday living and working
situations. They often work with people who are suffering from emotional
or behavioral impediments.
It is important to understand,
though, that simply majoring in these fields doesn’t guarantee you
employment. All of these fields require a specific sort of personality.
People who work in these fields often work with people who are in pain—both
physically and emotionally. These are people who are going to lash out
at the people around them, especially people who are trying to help
them. It is important to be able to take the lashing outs they are going
to give you without reacting to them personally. You are also going
to need to be able to continue to push them to work hard and do certain
things—even when the patient really doesn’t want to do them—without
crossing the line from being professional and doing your job to being
abusive. This is a hard line to walk for a lot of people.
All that being said—the careers in kinesiology as well as in the health and fitness field
can be incredibly rewarding. So, if you haven’t committed to your
studies yet, now is the time to do so!
