Reframing Your Skillset: Part 1

Reframing Your Skillset: Part 1

One of the most overwhelming aspects of contemplating a career move is figuring out what experience and skills you have already gained and which skills you will need to learn. We can have a tendency to assume the skills we do have aren’t right or good enough or even skills at all because they have become so second nature to us. But that couldn’t be further from the truth!?

Individuals who work in healthcare already have many skills that transfer seamlessly into the world of data analytics. Often these sorts of skill set lists are broken into “hard” or quantifiable skills and “soft” or transferable skills.?

Today let’s dive into which hard skills people in healthcare can easily transfer over to data analytics with some reframing.

Hard Skills:

• Tech: You may be shaking your head, but hear us out! You are actually very capable of learning new technology. How many EMR systems have you had to learn? At least a couple. How many tablets or computers have you used in your career? Several. And with each change you rose to the challenge. You learned day by day until you had it mastered. Learning SQL, Excel, R and Python are no different. Any of the classes, courses or bootcamps we mentioned in last week’s miniseries dole out this new knowledge bit by bit. You can absolutely learn new tech skills!
• Data Analysis: Huh?! Yes- you most definitely already do data analysis! Each and every day (and many times a day) you process large amounts of information from patients and analyze what steps you need to take in your specialty to help that patient. You distill this analysis into next steps (diagnoses, plans of care, home exercises, notes and referrals to your medical colleagues, etc.). So while you may need to learn more Excel or SQL or Python to do the technical side of data analytics, you are already more than capable of taking data and creating real world, actionable solutions. And that is what every single company wants in a data analyst.

Between tech experience, ability to learn new technology skills and doing data analysis daily you have the critical skills to make a career pivot. It is just a matter of reframing your perspective on what you already know.?

What do you think? Did we miss any other hard skills you think folks in healthcare already have that transfer to data analytics? If so, please let us know in the comments!

Coming Up Next:

Part 2: Transferable Skills aka Soft Skills

To excited to wait? Check out:

What Are Soft Skills?