November 4, 2024.
Author: Lynda Eversull, EKG Instructor for Altamont Healthcare. Edited by Anthony Rodriguez.
There’s a sense of personal accomplishment working with professionals in a hospital setting. Learning a career brings individual independence to your life – it ties together the ability to care for yourself and your family and your desire to help patients in need. It’s a wonderful and rewarding feeling to know that you helped someone in need and maybe even extended their life while providing for yourself and your loved ones.
While EKG technicians need technical skills like operating machines and identifying rhythms, their patient-facing position requires the tech to develop some soft skills to truly excel in their craft. Demonstrating empathy for the patients in their time of need and lending your ear to them are sometimes all that is needed is just to let the patients know you genuinely care for them. Your people skills will make a huge difference in how you handle patients, especially knowing that they are depending on you to help their situation.
Hospital employment comes with competitive pay scales. You can learn to become an EKG technician with your high school diploma, no college or experience needed. While being an EKG tech is a stable job, you definitely don’t want to stop at one certificate; it should be your goal to keep moving forward and learn different skills in the hospital environment.
There’s a learning curve to working effectively with the training needed to accomplish the duties of the job. As mentioned earlier, your technical expertise can only take you so far because real-life experience is about more than just what’s in your textbook. When you’re in training, the effort you put into learning will reflect in how quickly you’ll adapt to your role as a team member. Be curious and don’t be afraid to ask questions, it’s better to seek advice from a seasoned team member than potentially make the wrong call, especially when patients are involved.
You can learn to advance and grow in your career as an EKG tech; with each experience, you gain knowledge and understanding of the cases and develop ideas on how to address a variety of situations. There is also the possibility of advancement, moving into different departments in the hospital. EKG techs work directly with the heart, arguably the most vital organ of the human body. Because of this, departments outside of cardiology also need EKG technicians, giving you the ability to be on a variety of teams depending on your expertise. Gaining a good rapport with other professionals makes you familiar with their team(s), shows that they can depend on you, and can put you in a better position for moving up.
If you’re interested in becoming an EKG Technician in the Central Valley of California, Altamont Healthcare can provide you with the fastest start to your career. Our EKG program has seen tremendous success in getting our students placed in externships and connecting them with job opportunities after graduation. Lynda has years of experience as an EKG Technician and an instructor for the program, with many of her students leaving 5-star reviews on our Google pages! Altamont Healthcare offers 80% online/20% in-person classes and has locations in Stockton and Bakersfield.
If you’re interested in enrolling in our EKG program, you can start your journey here. And click here to find our contact information.
