Health Careers: A Guide to Finding Entry-Level Jobs in Health Care - Teachers Guide
This companion to Health Careers: A Guide to Finding Entry-Level Jobs in Health Care includes teaching suggestions, lessons and activities that will help instructors increase student knowledge about health careers.
The United States Department of Labor projects that health care will continue to experience tremendous job growth over the next decade. This growth provides an opportunity for adult learners to enter into a stable career with opportunities for advancement. Many of these high-demand jobs require less than two years of professional training.
This teacher’s guide is a companion to Health Careers: A Guide to Finding Entry-Level Jobs in Health Care. The curriculum is targeted to ESOL and ABE students at an intermediate or above level and is intended to provide a general overview of career information and resources. It is focused on four career sectors that encompass a wide-range of positions with a variety of job duties and responsibilities.: 1) patient care; 2) imaging and diagnostics; 3) health information and records (informatics); and 4) administrative and support services.
The guide includes teaching suggestions, lessons and activities that will help increase student knowledge about health careers. Instructors do not need to be an expert in health careers to teach this curriculum because their role is to provide students with a general understanding of the types of health careers they can pursue and the career resources and educational opportunities available in their community. Organizations such as Job Corps, local school district adult education programs, career and technical centers and state/community colleges often provide students with individual career planning assistance.
This resource guides instructors through a curriculum that is learner-centered and well designed with useful interactive materials that will meet the learning needs of most adults. The learning objectives are clearly stated and the curriculum supplies relevant vocabulary lists that instructors will find helpful. In addition, there are excellent suggestions for content-related discussions that allow students to process and interact with the subject matter while learning important vocabulary and practicing their language skills. Periodic assessments offered in the guide will help instructors determine how well the students are absorbing both content and language skills. The list of resources at the end of the teacher guide, provides links to more information that will be helpful to the instructors and the learners.
The resource can serve as a template for expanding instructional and career readiness curricula for in-demand occupational sectors (e.g., advanced manufacturing, information technology, transportation and logistics, hospitality). Students may be included in developing curricula by helping locate and verifying information, identifying relevant vocabulary and necessary education and training, including associated costs, etc. It could act as an effective tool to facilitate contextualized curricula development sessions for both academic instruction and career exploration and readiness – ultimately, creating a lesson/unit repository for others to access.
There are two small points that should be noted. On page 7 there is a confusing statement in which being a nursing assistant is equated with being a nurse. This point can be easily corrected by explaining that while nursing assistants are on a career pathway to nursing, the job is generally not considered to be a nursing position. There is also a statement on page 12 that implies a direct connection between training and pay. Unfortunately, this is not entirely accurate for the healthcare field. For example, social workers, often with many advanced degrees, usually receive considerable lower wages than nurses including those with only an Associate’s degree.
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