College Advice Blog

Nov 13, 2012

Health Information Technology - the Rising Career Field


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!

 

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