A career in healthcare can be so rewarding, but it’s not exactly famed for its simplicity or ease of entry! If you really want to excel in the medical industry, then you need to find ways to boost your career prospects.

There are a lot of things you can do here that would help in other sorts of careers. Increasing your work hours to gain more experience, spending more time in formal education, and working closely with your manager can all help you. But there are a few things that you may not have considered. Here are a few of the things you can do to give your medical career prospects a shot in the arm!

Look into new skills

Let’s say you want to head a medical department at some point. Maybe you’d even like the be a hospital administrator. Well, the raw medical skills aren’t always going to be enough. You’re going to need experience in managing people, as well as with the technical and financial aspects of the business.

You can approach this in one of two ways (or, perhaps, in both!). You can seek further education in the additional skills you want to acquire. Though this may be tricky, considering the often-long hours that a medical career already demands, it really shows your enthusiasm. Another way is to speak to your superiors about increasing your responsibilities or investigating on-site training programs.

Attend conferences

Business conferences don’t always sound like the most attractive prospect to many people. And, in many kinds of businesses, these conferences aren’t all that interesting. There are many out there that just see a supposed business expert get on stage and yell out a few buzzwords. But the right medical conference can be a different beast entirely.

Medical conferences are one of the best places to learn about the advances in treatments and technologies that you may have to find yourself becoming familiar with in the near future. They’re also fantastic places to get networking – an underappreciated aspect of boosting a medical career if there ever was one! You need to remember that the medical industry is just that – an industry. Approaching it as such can give you a pretty big head start. You can read up on some conferences occurring in 2017 here.

Learn a new language

You’d be surprised just how much knowing more than one language can boost a medical career.

In many ways, the career boosts you can get from being a bilingual medical professional match the bonuses you would see in other businesses. But there is something a bit more acute about the usefulness of these skills in medicine. The fact is that more and more facilities are looking for employees who can speak more than one language.

Back in 2008, a survey in the U.S. found that 74% of the country’s hospitals have a patient base whose first language isn’t English. Just how accurate this is isn’t certain, and more recent statistics seem to give more mixed results. But it’s clear that demand has increased, especially with so many hospitals paying bilingual doctors more – as many as three-quarters of medical businesses in the U.S., in fact.

This post has been contributed by Ryan Gatt, it may contain affiliate links.