Future Jobs: Care Professions

According to the World Economic Forum report on the jobs of tomorrow, seven distinct clusters of future professions show the biggest growth in numbers of opportunities in 2020-2022. The seven clusters are care professions, data and AI, engineering and cloud computing, green professions, marketing: sales and content, people and culture, and product development.

Emerging Jobs in the Care Professions

Emerging professions in care are those that have experienced the most growth over the previous five years. To arrive at these conclusions, LinkedIn and Burning Glass Technologies track the number of job openings posted in digital job boards and the number of professionals who are hired into new opportunities. Here are the top ten emerging jobs:

• Athletic Trainers
• Medical Equipment Preparers
• Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers
• Exercise Physiologists
• Recreation Workers
• Personal Care Aides
• Respiratory Therapists
• Medical Assistants
• Occupational Health and Safety Technicians
• Orderlies

The care economy is growing as the demand for childcare and care for the elderly is increasing. By 2022, it will create a great number of jobs; and to ensure the effectiveness of the future workforce, aspiring and current professionals will need to acquire competitive hard skills and supplementary soft skills.

Essential Hard Skills

In 2017, Deloitte made six predictions for the future of healthcare in 2022. Some of them include hopes for affordable smart healthcare technologies, exponential advances in life-extending therapies, and productivity improvements in the life sciences industry. To ensure the rapid development of the industry, professionals will need to consider an increasing demand for the following hard skills:

Respiratory therapy is a field that includes therapeutic methods of treating people who are suffering from acute critical conditions, including cardiac and pulmonary disease. Respiratory therapists graduate from a college or university with a degree in respiratory therapy and must pass a national board certifying examination.

Caregiving is most commonly used to address impairments related to old age, disability, a disease, or a mental disorder. The job doesn’t require formal training, and the responsibilities include managing medications or talking to doctors and nurses on someone’s behalf; helping to bathe or dress someone who is frail or disabled, or taking care of household chores.

Medical Transcription is a health profession that deals with transcribing voice-recorded medical reports dictated by healthcare professionals such as doctors or nurses. Transcribing the information on what procedures doctors have performed on a patient is necessary for keeping track of patients’ medical histories. The job allows for asynchronous work, thus, opening up the possibility of remote work internationally. On average, MTs can expect to receive anywhere from $12-$25 an hour, depending on how much transcript they can produce.

Radiation Treatment involves coordinating with radiologists and oncologists to administer therapies to patients, locate tumors, measure the amount of radiation given, and update treatment reports. To start, you will need an Associate’s degree or certificate in radiation therapy. Additionally, radiation oncology requires a medical dosimetrist who uses a computer with three-dimensional imaging software to contour normal organs on a treatment planning CT scan. Medical dosimetrists ensure that radiation treatment promotes the most lethal radiation dose with the fewest side effects to the patient’s healthy organs.

Interestingly enough, certain digital skills will be on par with job-related soft and hard skills, which circumstance demonstrates the increasing importance of basic computer literacy across professions.

Care Professions Additional Learning Priorities

Data scientists at Coursera have looked at the learning activities of individuals employed in emerging professions and have created a list of distinctive priorities for upskilling in those fields. For example, online learners employed in Care Economy roles are focused on courses such as Patient Safety and skills within that area of focus, such as problem-solving and design thinking.

Here are the five top courses to take as a supplement for anyone employed in care professions:

The Science of Well-Being

Skills taught: Kindness, Meditation, Savoring, Happiness, Gratitude

In this course you will engage in a series of challenges designed to increase your own happiness and develop more productive habits. Under the guidance of Yale Professor Laurie Santos, you will discover misconceptions about happiness and annoying features of the mind that lead us to think the way we do. You will be prepared to incorporate a specific wellness activity into your life successfully.

Essentials in Clinical Simulations across the Health Professions

Skills taught: Debriefing, Learning, Simulation

This seven-week course provides you with key strategies to help understand the foundation of clinical simulations to replicate real-world healthcare scenarios in an environment which is safe for education purposes. You will learn about seven key components of clinical simulations including the fundamentals, best practices, the basics of implementation and debriefing, and evaluation methods.

Nursing Informatics Leadership

Skills taught: Nursing, Exercise, Mentorship, Leadership

This specialty integrates nursing science with multiple information and analytical sciences to identify, define, manage and communicate information in nursing practice. The course will focus on the history of nursing informatics, its potential, and its principles. As part of the specialization, you will develop a portfolio with your personalized analysis report, and conduct a personal values assessment and revised personal leadership mission statement.

Patient Safety

Skills taught: Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, Healthcare Leadership

Preventable harm to patients, including medical errors, result not from individual clinicians’ mistakes, but from systemic problems. As part of the course, you will identify the core aspects of a strong patient safety culture, describe processes, and analyze quality measures to identify areas for improvement. Successful participants will learn strategies for enhancing teamwork, managing change, and measuring success.

Vital signs: understanding what the body is telling us

Skills taught: Pain Management, Human Error Assessment, and Reduction Technique

The vital signs – heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, respiration rate, and pain – communicate important information about the physiological status of the human body. In this six-part course you will explore the anatomy and physiology that underlie the vital signs so that you will develop a systematic, integrated understanding of how the body functions.

Knowledge of current trends in the care industry will allow you to become a top candidate for a medical school. Check out NYU School of Medicine, Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, and Perelman School of Medicine at Penn for full scholarships to enter top med schools!

Photos: Shutterstock / Photomontage: Martina Advaney

Support us!

All your donations will be used to pay the magazine’s journalists and to support the ongoing costs of maintaining the site.