Did you know that the the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) website has a myriad of resources for students wanting to prepare for a career in Health Information Management (HIM)? We are going to take a look at the Career Prep Workbook located under the ‘Career Prep Tools’ resource area (see steps below).
- Go to www.ahima.org
- Click on ‘Student & Career Center’
- Hover over ‘Career Prep Tools’
- Click on ‘Career Prep Workbook’
Here will you find several tabs with different career prep tools that are available to you, including information on landing your first HIM job, career prep webinars, student recordings, and also the career prep workbook (below). Click on the Career Prep Workbook link to download the workbook.
The workbook should open for you in a new window*:
This 29 page document is essentially your “one-stop shop for planning, preparing, and initiating your job search in the HIM industry” (AHIMA Career Prep Workbook, 2018, pg. 2) and includes such things as a Career Goal Questionnaire, interactive Career Map, information on preparing for the perfect job (including a webinar on creating the perfect resume), information on creating a cover letter, as well as tips on how to prepare for both phone and face-to-face interviews (2018).On page 8 of the document is a link to an Interactive HIM Career Map: https://my.ahima.org/careermap
The Career Map shows you the various job avenues that are available to HIM professionals; including roles in the coding and revenue cycle, informatics, data analytics, and information governance sectors (2018). The interactive tool allows you to click on each potential job role (eg: HIM Revenue Cycle Analyst) to see a description of the role, responsibilities, skills required, alternate titles for the role, related jobs, and other resources (eg: payscale, indeed, etc). I have created a short video on how to navigate AHIMA’s Career Map, which can be found here: https://youtu.be/UrbbdlMwIwk.
AHIMA’s Career Map tool is useful because sometimes HIM students and professionals don’t realize how many different opportunities and career avenues actually exist in the field of Health Information Management.
*Note: You need to be a student member of AHIMA to access this workbook. You can find information about becoming a student member of AHIMA here: https://my.ahima.org/pages/membership/membership.aspx
I hope that you find the AHIMA Career Map to be a useful and informative tool in navigating potential HIM career avenues, and that you find AHIMA’s Career Prep Workbook to be a helpful resource in preparing you for your next role!
-Beth
Beth McLeod
MS IHCM, RHIA, CCS, CDIP
Academic Dept. Chair-HIM
References:
AHIMA Career Map. (n.d.). Retrieved September 30, 2019, from https://my.ahima.org/careermap.
AHIMA Career Prep Workbook. (2018, February). http://www.ahima.org/careers/careerprep?tabid=workbook.
