Partner Solutions Blog
Employer Solutions
Academic Solutions
Is Your Digital Learning Environment up to the Task?
Remote learning offers a flexible, efficient solution for your organization’s training needs. While building a remote learning environment may seem daunting, it becomes manageable with the right digital learning environment (DLE) – a unified set of tools and platforms designed to facilitate online learning. DLE encompasses the tools, technology and platforms needed to deliver and facilitate online education.
This environment shapes how learners interact with their coursework and retain knowledge. When your team members undergo a reskilling or upskilling program, they gain more than just new skills, they experience a holistic approach to career development. Here’s a closer look at the essential components of a robust digital learning environment.
What is Credit for Prior Learning? A Guide for Academic Leaders
With higher education enrollment on the decline, identifying learners with skills gained through alternative education opportunities, work or community-based experiences can be a game changer for educational institutions, like yours.
Credit for Prior Learning allows you, as an academic leader, to provide students academic recognition regardless of informal or formal education. Here is a look at what credit for prior learning is, its benefits and how to set up your own program by partnering with MedCerts.
Increase Graduation Rates Through Course Content Innovation
When students are engaged in learning, they become active participants in their education. This active participation helps boost their success and lead to better outcomes upon graduation. To achieve these goals and increase graduation rates, educational institutions should consider course content innovation. Innovating coursework lets you attract more students, boost year-over-year enrollment and help students become ready for the real world.
Workforce Solutions
MedCerts Program Solutions
Partnering to Address Dental Assistant Demand
It’s the question every dental practice is wondering: where are all the dental assistants?
According to Jennifer Zabel, a senior allied health program director with MedCerts, the biggest challenge affecting the dental assistant profession is the labor shortage. Scores of assistants left dentistry during COVID closures, which only compounded existing labor shortages caused by burnout, turnover, retirements, and a host of other life issues that cause people to leave healthcare jobs.
Dental assistants are essential and highly visible members of the dental practice. They provide a variety of services: greeting and scheduling patients, taking x-rays, keeping records, and assisting dentists and dental hygienists throughout the appointment. In addition, they pour dental models, help to fabricate temporary crowns, assist with the application of sealant, fluoride and topical anesthetics, and provide aftercare instructions. Dental practices frankly cannot do without them.
Of the one million people who work in dentists’ offices, more than a third are dental assistants. Today, the nation has some 370,000 assistants and, each year, dental offices need about 64,000 new and replacement dental assistants. Over the next 10 years, growth is projected to be about 10%.
The need for dental assistants, in other words, is not going away. If something is to be done about the labor shortage, it must be now.
How to Help a New Generation of Talent Get Started as Surgical Techs
The labor shortage in the US is legendarily widespread. In healthcare, it is critical. But for surgical tech jobs in particular, it is shutting down operating rooms, limiting the number of surgeries, and affecting the quality of patient care.
Today, there are thousands of openings for surgical techs across hospitals and surgery centers, and it is increasingly difficult to find people to fill this important entry-level healthcare position. According to the BLS, more than 120,000 people currently work as surgical technologists and the field is projected to grow by 6% over the next decade. Between new and replacement jobs created by churn, healthcare providers need to hire about 10,000 surgical techs per year. Not to mention, vacancies can take up to a year to fill. That’s a long time for a hospital to go without the critical personnel who gather all the necessary equipment ahead of time, hand instruments to the surgeon, and even hold organs in place during surgery.
To help solve this labor crisis, MedCerts has designed a best-in-class surgical technologist certificate to support colleges and healthcare providers looking for a more accessible, affordable, and reliable way to get qualified surgical techs into the workforce.
Apprenticeships
Building the Future Allied Health Workforce with Apprenticeships
As people seek better ways to enter or move around within the labor market, there’s no question that an increasingly mainstream approach has been apprenticeships. According to the Department of Labor, nearly 610,000 Americans are currently working as apprentices, a 106% increase since 2013. Given the high cost of postsecondary education, the need to hire quickly, and the relaxing of degree requirements, apprenticeships have become an appealing and effective alternative to college.
Healthcare Apprenticeships Offer Northwest Illinois a Solution to Shortages
In the world of healthcare, apprenticeships are relatively new and rare. But Karen Kryder, the innovative learning team leader for FHN—a non-profit regional healthcare system with 17 locations across five counties in Northwest Illinois—is working to change that.
Henry Ford Health Uses the Apprenticeship Model to Attract and Develop Talent
Takeaways:
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Factors like the cost of education, low replacement rates, compensation, retirements and an aging population have made hiring healthcare workers extremely difficult.
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According to Catherine Susko, director of talent solutions for Henry Ford Health, the best way to resolve labor shortage challenges is to “create opportunities for development and advancement.”
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The 107-year-old healthcare provider must find new ways to staff up if it wants to continue to provide much-needed services to the surrounding community.
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The apprenticeship model is ideal for HFH because it “helps people who would not otherwise know about opportunities in healthcare to learn and pursue these jobs.”
