Best Hospitals of 2011-12

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US News and World Report has released its list of the top hospitals for 2011-12.  This is interesting as it shows where some of the most sought after jobs might be for Allen School Online graduates.  The rankings include hospitals in 15 states so there’s lots of choices if you’re seeking to move to a specific area to begin your new career.  View the list here.

Why They Don’t Call You Back

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Taking your new medical billing and coding certificate out to look for a job is exciting.  You comb over listings, find positions, send cover letters and get interviews.  But then something curious happens.  You go home and wait for a call from the interviewer which never comes.  Ever wonder why sometimes you get the silent treatment from a prospective employer?  There are a number of surprising reasons why you may not get called back.  The good news is that most of the reasons why are not mystical.  In fact, if you’re aware of the most commonly occurring mistakes, you can avoid them altogether and improve your call-back ratio. Yahoo! Hot Jobs’s Larry Buhl put together a list of the Top Six Reasons They Didn’t Call You Back.  Read the list and take to heart the message so you can become a more effective interview subject and land that dream job.

How Much Would I Earn in Miami?

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Medical Coding Bell CurveOnce you have earned a certification in medical billing and coding, you have the ability to find a good job in many different parts of the country.  Some markets pay more than others.  Some markets have a high cost of living while others do not.   Knowing what you can expect to earn in this field (in any given zip code) can really help you decide where you want to go to ply your new trade.  To determine how much you could earn in any town in the USA, I recommend the salary wizard at www.salary.com where you enter in your job title and zip code where you’d like to work to find out what the earning potential is there.

We’re Number 3!

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Yahoo! recently published a list of the top 5 fastest growing jobs in the medical field.  Medical Records and Health Information Technician took the number 3 place on the list!  With a very attractive average annual salary, medical billing and coding specialists can anticipate continued strength in the job market for people with their qualifications.  Click here to view the list and the entire article.

Dress for Success or, The Idiot’s Guide to Ironing

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Having your new certification and a brain full of knowledge is great, but as we all know, landing a job often comes down to making a good first impression at the interview.  Part of making that good first impression is obviously the way you speak and interact with the interviewer and how you convey your qualifications.  Yet, even more subtle but no less important is the visual first impression you make.  How you’re dressed and how you take care of your appearance is a powerful, unspoken indicator of how you will be as an employee.  To this point, it is critical that you wear appropriate clothes and that these clothes are nicely pressed and creased in the proper places.  This brings me to the point.  I don’t know about you, but I cannot afford to spend $12 per outfit to the dry cleaner for pressed shirts and pants.  Furthermore, I am challenged when it comes to ironing these items myself.  That was until I found this great post on Lifehacker.com explaining the finer points on DIY clothes pressing.  Read up on how to bone up your appearance and show up at the interview crispy, smart and ready to impress.

Resumè Samples

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Getting ready to capture the return on your investment into online job training and education?  That means you’ll be taking your newly earned certification out to the market to land yourself a j-o-b.  The first step in that process is to line up some interviews.  And that means putting together a new resumè.  This is a task that a lot of people find daunting.  But, have no fear.  The best way to understand how to structure all the job history and qualifications information into a memorable resumè is to see some examples of other peoples’ resumès.  Here’s a great list of about 90 resumes from the folks at Monster.com, collected from people seeking many different kinds of positions.  Even if some of the samples are for jobs in other industries, it is still very instructive to see how people structure the information they include.  Have a look at some of these and remember, what you leave off a resumè is just as important as what you include.

Leading Edge of Medical Innovation

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How lucky you are to be entering into such an exciting field?  The field of medicine has made significant advances in the last 100 years.  Quantum advances.  Advances that would have been scoffed at as flights of science fiction fancy by medical contemporaries in 1911.  Case in point, Mitch Hunter, a man whose face was dramatically disfigured in a car accident.  At age 30, he has successfully undergone a face transplant.  (No, not a face plant like this old blogger makes when trying to ride his 6 year old’s skateboard!)  I’m talking about an actual face transplant.  Only the seventh successful such surgery in the world.  Click here to read more about this fantastic medical advancement and be stoked to be training in a career field that holds such enormous potential for good.

Got MRSA?

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According to a Reuter’s article, scientists have found Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aurelius in raw milk samples in the US and UK.  The superbug has been growing in prevalence and represents a significant challenge to medicine because it is an infection that, as the name implies, is resistant to antibiotics.  Concurrent to this story is the outbreak of a new strain of E. Coli across Europe.  It would seem to this blogger that both these outbreaks are rooted, at least in part, in the practices of large corporate food producers and the sometimes shoddy agricultural processes in which they engage.  Read these past posts, here, here and here for more information on both MRSA and animal husbandry/food safety.

And Press ‘3’ to Shoot Yourself in the Face

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New laptop malfunctioning?  Cell phone service wrongly interrupted?  Utility company make a mistake on your monthly bill?  You’ll have to dial a toll-free customer service number and then navigate through level after level of recorded messages trying to find the answer to your problem.  And after an hour on the phone, you’ll be no closer to a solution and about ready to kill someone.  Sound familiar?  We all have had to deal with customer service issues like this.  Well, awesome site, Lifehacker.com recently published this great piece on how to get better customer service when you should need to.   Included in the article is a link to an application called “Lucy” that does the “holding” for you so you don’t have to glue the phone to your ear while the company you’re calling is “experiencing unusually high call volumes resulting in long hold times”.  That’s a godsend to be sure.  And if that’s not enough, and the tips in this article still don’t get you satisfaction, the article provides a link to the Consumerist.com’s list of customer service executives from the world’s top companies so you can call a supervisor direct to lodge your complaint about the sorry state of their customer service department.

Interviewer: “Any Questions?” You: “Uhhh…”

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Acing the interview is pretty much the key to landing a job.  The rock-solid resume gets you in to the interview.  But the interview itself is the “make-or-break” step in the job hunting process.  If you’ve done enough of these, you know that they typically ask you alot of questions about your background, experience, skills etc.  Then at the end, they always ask, “Do you have any questions for us?”  Most people don’t know how to answer this and either say, “No” which indicates unpreparedness or worse, being intellectually incurious.  Or many respond, “When do I get vacation” or “how much does the job pay?”  Both these questions do more damage than good.  There are questions you may ask of an interviewer which demonstrate that you are interested in the job and have a good head on your shoulders.  Click here to read “The Six Must Ask Interview Questions” as listed by Monster.com’s Joe Turner.  He explains why these are the most important questions to ask and what they say about the person who asks them.