gear head

np & best of luck; would've PM'd you my LinkedIn but neither of our post counts are sufficient to do so lol.

Congratulations! Would you mind elaborating on the nature of your work? Do you work with one hospital/ hospital group, or do you bounce from project to project? Do you travel extensively? Do you take your work home?

Sorry to thread jack here. I understand you had a question directed to leekaye but here are my 2 cents. From my personal experience, certifications/ skills specific to a PRODUCT might help you to land your dream job a lot easier. For example, EPIC (INC. or a project) is less likely to hire you if all your skill sets revolve around CERNER. You might be able to convince them the benefit of cross-training, if they are desperate enough they might take the bait. A broader spectrum support specialist certification might get you a position like trainer/ scheduler perhaps. Which is not bad for a starter right? I'd go on LinkedIn and join specific HIT groups, look for what kind of certs/ skills keyword recruiters are looking for and start your network/ career build from there.

The followings are some of my observations from INTENSE (wowzer! first paragrah in and we've already brought in the CAPITAL LETTERS) involvement with different facets of nursing informatics (clinical strategies, GoLive, superuser training, project management). Note they are not in any particular order, and as this post progresses, both your and my attention span diminishes. Mine more than yours. 1. Additional degrees/ certs are not of importance if you are just starting at the bottom of the EHR/NI ladder. As long as you know the Workflow (a big word that gets tossed frequently) and contribute to the Project/ Team as a resource of how the workflow of a nuit/ department can be translated into the digital enviornment of Cerner/ Epic/ AllScripts, do not even bother with a BSN or MSN. 2. Through my past experience there are bad apples. Your advanced degree in nursing informatics might get you into the door but quickly you are tried and tested. There are very little room for excuses like "the computer crashed before I get to save it," or "I pasted a large area of cells and lost all my previous work." The diploma mill only teaches/ requires you how to save a word document, or a powerpoint at best. Do you know right clicking the mouse can bring you more options/ actions? Can you work comfortably with excel under time pressure? I'm talking about 200+ lines with different shades, borders, colors, comment-inserts or printing/ fitting information on one page, mapping/ finding printers, work the projectors, VISIO, that some of you might find rudimentary, but hey, some of those bad apples I spoke earlier.. let's just politely say we all bring different talents to the team. 3. The reward threshhold is completely different. It's very rewarding to be a floor nurse, I feel good and a sense of accomplishment by the end of my 8 or 12 hour shift. But with a GoLive project? It's anywhere from 8 to 12 months. It demands you a lot of after hours to construct, refine your workflow, checking your email, being in the meetings. At times you can't move forward with your responsibility until someone else finishes his/ her part first. It's a lot less independent, a lot more hours. A nursing informaticist lives just like my Google/Yahoo/ IBM engineer buddies-- you bring your work home and you are tied to emails and con calls. 4. The consultants make twice as much as we do, but they know how to build. How do you start at that path as a builder or a project manager? By applying to the companies that sell EHR products (Cerner, Epic, etc). After a few years you can link up with a IT staffing company and start consulting. But they work from project to project so job security is obviously an issue and many of nurses do not have a tolerance for that. Most of the consultants travel weekly to their job, then return to their home town for the weekends. They sit in front of the screen for 6, 7 hours. It's not a healthy lifestyle but you do get acclimated to it. You just have to figuer out if this is the best option for your current stage of life. 5. Consultants, although the pay's great, can get fired on the job. One really has to know his/ her stuff well, articulate well, and mingle well with all the coworkers (aka there are politics). Watch Don Cheadle's "House of Lies" if you feel you are completely oblivious about corprorate culture. 6. You won't find this field rewarding if you. are. kind. of. lazy. Let's face it, we all got a lil of that in us. We've all seen some floor nurses who take longer breaks, that's from shift to shift and it's so much easier to get by. But a project, you are accountable for many things and everything you do has a digital copy (an email request, a trigger in the system, an initial in the integration testing audit report). If you can't act or deliver timely (a question during conf call, or they need a powerpoint/ Excel sheet by the end of the day to persuade the big wigs to hire more travlers, or delay the GoLive and lose half a mil), the PM is less likely to think of you when she's hiring for her next project. 7. Project management requires some or a combination of "survivor traits" such as a great mind, symmetrical facial features, and charisma. If you fall out of that bell curve, don't worry, you can make it up with skillful interpersonal skills. In the great words of Kip Fulbeck, "adults act, children react"-- keep your personal feelings checked at the door and turn on the sunshine. The survivors (they are really sharks, actually) I work with, they have great recall and eyesight that allow them to quickly navigate through a screen filled with a bunch of icons and navigators-- and they don't just stop there. They are able to clearly articulate and explain the relevance of that screen to PM or team members. Most if not all of them are super articulate, while many of them got the corprorate look. Frustrated? Don't be, NI is not the only career in this universe. There are plenty of other nursing jobs/ fields that will earn you comparable or more salary with much less GERD/ afterhour works. 8. The upside is your work enviornment is cleaner, it doesn't smell, your patient doesn't hit you or the family doesn't report you; no needle sticks, no med error- potential of losing the RN license you work so hard for. But you have to deal with people and politics (not just your average nursing unit politics b/c no matter how much you fight, you are still needed for the sake of balancing the schedule), and I know a lot of people who get into nursing because they want to avoid that very culture. 9. Use LinkedIn to network. You might stay with one hospital if you are lucky, (if a position's deemed necessary after GoLive or the CNO, CIO really liked your work and wanted to retain you-- but what are the odds of that? Depends on funding and policy) but most likely you are gonna be jumping from job to job like those consultants (who earn twice as you do). 10. At some point, usually 6 weeks before GoLive, you are going have to teach superusers and end users. Can you articulate well and enunciate clearly? Can you handle public speaking or a resistant learner? You need to PROJECT YOURSELF not only for teaching but during con calls and meetings too. Again, that "different kind of reward threshhold" surfaced when taking these into consideration.