A Career Map for Paramedics

Repost of an article I wrote about 7 years ago on my original LinkedIn account.

I am certain that my journey in EMS mimics many others. There are highs and lows, good times and bad. Sometimes you feel as if you are on top of the world, and other times you wish you could quit that same day and go do something different. When I was 16 I made the decision to get involved in EMS as a volunteer EMT. I signed up for my local volunteer ambulance service, went to the recruitment meeting with my dad (he had to sign forms since I wasn’t even 18 at the time) and told the panel that I wanted to get into EMS so that I could get clinical experience to become a physician one day. This career trajectory is something that many in EMS had thought of before me. Despite my best laid plans, I didn’t account for how much I would love the job. After graduating high school, I decided that I would take a detour from my original plan and go to Paramedic school. After all, having experience as an ALS provider would only serve me better in my plans of becoming a doctor one day.

The day came, I graduated paramedic school, passed my National Registry and started to work. At 21, I was starting IVs, giving medications, intubating people, delegating tasks to other prehospital care providers twice my age, making autonomous clinical decisions about critically ill people and giving reports to trauma teams about someone who had been shot 4 times in the chest, only to leave the trauma bay feeling like I had truly made a difference. The reality is I was doing an important job, that was new to me and making decent money for a single guy in his early 20’s without any real life responsibilities.

Fast forward 13 years after my start in EMS and you find me looking for more and being frustrated with the lack of options. In case you are wondering what happened to medical school, life circumstances combined with procrastination got in the way of achieving that goal a long time ago. More importantly, I became an idealist paramedic and bought into the fact that the EMS industry is more than a stepping stone. This is something that I truly believe. The fact is we have some of the brightest and most innovative people working as EMT’s and Paramedics. However, when they reach a point where they ask their industry “where do I go from here?” without an easy answer, it can feel as if you are at a dead end.

Over the last couple of years, I have made it my mission to find opportunities for paramedics outside of the ambulance. You can find articles scattered around the web with lists that include things like “work in an ER” or “work on an oil rig.” While these may be interesting and fulfilling jobs, they also don’t really offer a complete change of pace and that sense of growth. Really it is exchanging the setting as to which a paramedic works in. The real challenge is identifying opportunities for vertical mobility that a paramedic could target as a next step in their career. I have had the pleasure of interacting with a variety of paramedics that have decided to become very creative and develop opportunities for themselves. Some of these prehospital entrepreneurs have been kind enough to give me some advice and tell me about how they got started.

This article isn’t about a solution to a problem, but rather it serves as a call to action by those who have found opportunities within our career field. The main thing that I would ask is those who have found success, pay it forward. Become a mentor and give advice to those who are hungry for growth.

I feel that if we continue to work together, share experiences with one another, give those who are eager an opportunity to grow and foster interest within prehospital care, we will continue to grow as an industry.