HLTH 1015 Week 11 Career Exploration Reflection Example

The Preference I Arrived With, the Evidence That Unsettled It and Where I Stand Now: A Closing Reflection on Health Services Management

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 1015: Exploring Your Path: Foundations Across Fields

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Preference I Arrived With, the Evidence That Unsettled It and Where I Stand Now: A Closing Reflection on Health Services Management

The Preference I Arrived With

I started this course with a clear preference and a vague picture. The preference was health services management. The picture was an office job with regular hours, built around budgets and schedules, reachable with a bachelor's degree and some luck. In Week 1, I described what drew me as the satisfaction of fixing how things run in my pharmacy, and I set that pull beside the Handbook's account of what health services managers do. That comparison already showed cracks in the picture: the Handbook described evening and weekend work in round-the-clock facilities and an expectation of health care experience in addition to a degree (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.). At the time I noted those cracks and moved on. This reflection goes back to them.

Those cracks turned out to matter.

The Evidence That Unsettled It

Three pieces of evidence from the term changed my view, and each came from a different kind of source.

The source evaluation. In Week 4, I evaluated a college program page that promised six-figure salaries. Checking it against the Handbook showed that the salary figure described experienced managers, not new graduates. I realized I had been carrying a version of that headline in my own head. My picture of the job had been built from marketing, not from evidence.

The informational interview. In Week 7, a practice administrator told me that conversations with staff, physicians and patients fill most of her working week, and that managers she watched struggle were mostly the ones who put off hard conversations. That was the most unsettling piece of evidence, because my own self-assessment had listed avoiding conflict as a weakness. The job I was drawn to depends heavily on the skill I have least.

The credential map. In Week 8, I mapped every credential on the path to the body that issues it. The map showed that most of the path depends on employers rather than licensing bodies, and that the only firm requirement for my first step is a bachelor's degree. This was encouraging, but it also showed that employers decide almost everything, so my pharmacy experience and my evidence of skills would matter more than any certificate.

Career theory suggests that people's interests follow their beliefs about what they can do and what will happen if they do it (Lent et al., 1994). This term tested both beliefs. My belief about outcomes, the salary and the office, turned out to be inflated. My belief about my abilities turned out to be half right: strong on problem solving, weak on conflict.

Where I Stand Now

My preference for health services management survived the term, but it is a different preference from the one I started with. I now want to work in practice operations, beginning in revenue cycle or patient access in a physician practice, because the evidence shows that this is where my pharmacy experience transfers and where hours are more predictable. I no longer think of management as an office job; I think of it as a job made mostly of conversations, with budgets and schedules around the edges. And I no longer think of my conflict avoidance as a minor weakness. It is the first item on my action plan, ahead of any credential.

It would be easy to say the course changed my mind, but it would not be accurate. The original preference survived intact in one important way: I still want to fix how services run. What changed is my understanding of what that requires. Holland's theory describes people being drawn to work environments that match their interests (Holland, 1997), and I think my interest in organizing and improving systems matched the field all along. What did not match was the picture I had of the field's daily work.

The change also shows up in how I talk about the field. In Week 1 I described health services management with words like coordinate and oversee. Now I describe it with words like negotiate, explain and decide, which are the verbs the practice administrator used when she described her week. That shift in vocabulary is a small sign that my picture of the work is now built from people who do it rather than from descriptions written to attract students.

What I Will Do Differently

Three habits from this course will stay with me. First, check numbers against the source they cite, as I did in Week 4. Second, ask people who do the job what their week looks like, rather than relying on descriptions. Third, separate requirements from preferences and attach every requirement to the body that sets it. These habits apply beyond career planning; they are the same habits a health care administrator needs when reading a vendor's claims or a new regulation.

If I took this course again, I would do the informational interview earlier. It changed my view more than any reading, and doing it in Week 3 instead of Week 7 would have given me more time to test what I learned. I would also interview two people instead of one, since a single administrator's path cannot represent the field, as I noted in my write-up.

The term ends with a plan, a clearer picture and an uncomfortable but useful finding about myself. That is more than I expected from a first course, and more useful than the certainty I arrived with.

There is also something I would keep exactly the same: writing down my beliefs before each piece of evidence. Before the interview I listed three beliefs, and afterward I could say clearly which had moved. Without that list, I think I would have remembered the interview as confirming what I already thought, because that is how memory tends to work. Writing beliefs down first is a simple habit, and it made the difference between learning something and feeling as if I had.

References

Holland, J. L. (1997). Making vocational choices: A theory of vocational personalities and work environments (3rd ed.). Psychological Assessment Resources.

Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D., & Hackett, G. (1994). Toward a unifying social cognitive theory of career and academic interest, choice, and performance. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 45(1), 79-122. https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.1994.1027

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.). Medical and health services managers. Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/medical-and-health-services-managers.htm