NYTimes Says Health Care is a Great Place to Find a Job

While lay offs and rising job losses have become the new reality for so many sectors of the economy, the health care field continues to see job growth. The New York times reported yesterday that hospitals added 135,000 jobs last year and 19,400 more in the first half of 2009. The growth has attracted lots of new people to the field, many of whom are searching for further education in health care management and leadership:

Midcareer managers and other workers have been migrating to health care jobs for years, of course. Now, with the recession, the lure is even stronger. Hospitals, which employ more than four million people, added 135,000 jobs last year and 19,400 more in the first half of 2009, even as millions of American workers wound up unemployed.

“The demand for talented leaders in health care is only going to go up,” predicted Jane Groves, a senior vice president at Integrated Healthcare Strategies, an executive search and consulting firm in Kansas City, Mo. “All that demand can’t and shouldn’t be filled by people already working in health care.”

Frank Pinkowsky worked as a manager at DuPont for 24 years before taking a position as senior vice president for human resources at the Guthrie Clinic in Sayre, Pa. “Don’t underestimate the value of what you learned working for someone else,” he advised.

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The [Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health] ... is the largest of dozens of accredited graduate and undergraduate programs in hospital management. Many managers with experience in fields like human resources, finance and marketing find a welcome in health care, with a little studying up. Online courses, books, journals and professional magazines provide material.

The American College of Healthcare Executives, based in Chicago, offers several online pages of career tips, including a two-year-old salary summary at www.ache.org. The Association of University Programs in Health Administration also lists contact information for many schools at www.aupha.org.

Read the full article at NYTimes.com.