In this blog post, I am going to go over from start to finish, a potential route to getting your first role as a healthcare data analyst.
If you prefer to watch, check out the video from the Health Analytic Insights YouTube channel here:
Generic advice would be to get a degree at any college or university in Computer Science or Health Informatics and then once completed, a job offer will manifest. This might have been the case in the past but these days the job market is challenging, to say the least, and a degree is not a guarantee that you will get a role in your desired field.
However, a degree in addition to other factors might significantly increase your chance of getting an entry-level role in this field. Before spending thousands of dollars on any program you will want to do a significant amount of research.
Step 1: Identify the key skills listed in healthcare analyst job roles and determine if the degree program you want to apply to will teach you these skills
Some of the common soft and technical skills requested for healthcare data analyst roles are:
- Knowledge of SQL programming language to query relational databases.
- Experience with visualization tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, etc.…
- Experience working with large clinical datasets including manipulating, maintaining, preparing data, and presenting analyses and reports for different audiences.
- Ability to work both independently and in teams
Therefore, when searching for a degree program you want to see if any of their courses will teach you how to write SQL queries, database concepts, and data visualization skills using up-to-date tools, such as, Power BI and Tableau. You should do your due diligence to make sure you will be learning tools that are used in industry and not tools that are specific to academia or are outdated.
Another tip is to reach out to alumni of the program on LinkedIn because oftentimes these programs will showcase past students. Ask them if you can have a few minutes of their time to ask them what they thought about the value of the program, how long it took them to find a job, and if they felt the program advisor was helpful in their job search. I have received several questions and comments from listeners of the Health Analytic Insights Podcast who went through these expensive degree programs, struggled to find jobs and advisors would not help them or left them completely on their own.
Obtaining your degree is a huge time and cost investment and unless you want to stay in academia and become a professor, the outcome should be to find a job, so you want to optimize your time as much as possible, by learning things that will be relevant during a job interview.
Step 1B: If you have prior experience and you are pivoting into this field, find ways to job shadow
You might have prior experience working as a clinician, project manager or business analyst and want to pivot into the healthcare data analyst role. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the first option be to immediately go get another degree as you already have key transferrable skills that can help you to pivot into this field. In this scenario, you might need to work on expanding your network and self-learning any technical skills you might be missing. For example, there are several project manager roles in the healthcare field and the skills you might have used in a previous role in a different industry, might be relevant to the healthcare data analyst role. In this situation, you might just need to learn how to write basic SQL queries or learn Power BI. This might be done by reaching out to a coworker in your existing organization who might work in the Business Intelligence or Decision Support Department and asking them how to best learn these skills.
Step 2: Gap Analysis Learn the Technical Skills
Once you have determined you have a technical skill gap based on what common skills are listed in the healthcare data analyst role, it’s time to fill this gap! You can do this by attending a degree program which will teach you these skills or self-learning.
One of the best ways to learn and retain information, instead of just passively reading it from a textbook or even watching a YouTube video, is to practice the skills you are learning. This is why I would suggest bridging this gap by creating a project that has you practicing these technical skills. When I was developing my technical skills, one area that I found missing was a lack of online courses highlighting a clinical problem (e.g., determining re-admission rates back to hospitals). There are several analytical courses out there but I couldn’t find anything that could help me to gain experience working with a clinical dataset so that I could practice my technical skills and build a portfolio project that would be relevant for hiring managers during the healthcare data analyst interview.
After years of experience in this field, I ended up creating the course: Learn the Skills to Get Your First Role as a Healthcare Analyst, which helps you to create an analytical project from start to finish while getting exposed to common clinical metrics in the field.
Step 3: Prepare for the Interview
Once you feel confident in your now-developed technical and soft skills you are ready to prepare your resume and get ready for the interview. When it comes to the main body of your resume, make sure to use action verbs to highlight any previous work experience or project work you have done. For instance, include examples of your work experience using quantitative data (e.g. created reports and dashboards for the emergency department, which helped to reduce patient readmission rates by 20%) and highlight ways you made a significant difference at your previous organization.
If you have no experience in this field, try to highlight any relevant skills, capstone projects or courses you have completed, which showcase your passion for advancing in the field, you can do this at the top of your resume and within the body of the resume. Relevant internship or co-op experience can go above your degree if your degree is unrelated to healthcare analytics.
Step 4: Always Keep Learning
This field is rapidly changing and keeping informed is important with the latest emerging trends, especially with how artificial intelligence will be integrated into the healthcare field in the future. Keep reading books, listen to podcasts and click the button below to subscribe to the Health Analytic Insights Newsletter, for regular updates about the health informatics field.
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