Medical assistance/assisting

Medical assistants are the people who do the medical assistance or assisting: as you would expect from the name there.

As the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us medical assistance is expected to be one of the fastest growing occupations over the next 10 years.

There are two main reasons for this, the first that as we all live longer we all need more medical treatment and assistance.

The second is that medicine itself it becoming more complex, so doctors are concentrating only on those most complex tasks. Medical assisting is therefore growing as doctors hire more medical assistants to help them with everything else.

Medical assistance training can be purely on the job (although this is unusual now), at a vocational school or through a degree program.

Training in medical assistance

There are some medical assistants who have done their training purely by learning on the job. This is becoming much rarer now as employers prefer people who have trained formally, either through school, a degree or a community college.

Programs in a vocational school usually last one year and lead to a certificate in medical assisting and those at community colleges two years and lead to a degree.

Once you have qualified further career advances can be made by specializing and taking further training. Some states also require certification for certain procedures.

But the most important thing to remember is that employers like to hire people with formal training and certification.

Source Bureau of Labor Statistics.