Nontraditional Career Paths in EMS

hey guys my name's sam and welcome to prepmedic in this week's video we're going to be talking about some of the different career paths you can take as an emt or paramedic [Music] a huge misconception when it comes to ems and being an emt or paramedic is that you can only ride on an ambulance and that is really the only job prospect you have so in this week's video i want to debunk that a little bit and show you some of the different options you can take as an emt or a paramedic now i'm not an expert in a lot of these i have not done a lot of these so this is more of just an introduction telling you they're out there give you some keywords that you can search and then it's up to you to do your own research and figure out what companies are in your area what services are in your area and what would be feasible for you or fit your lifestyle so without further ado let's get into the video so probably the three most common jobs for an emt or paramedic are going to be on an ambulance in an inner facility transfer role which is where a lot of people start they start at a private industry private service like amr rural metro uh which they own each other um or you know action care or an ambulance service like that they're for-profit service and they're generally used as a stepping stone into the 911 realm that leads us to the second aspect of that which is a 911 paramedic now we've talked about this in the pay video that can be a third service so you're owned by the state county city you can be based as a fire medic so you're a firefighter and paramedic running an ambulance or sometimes not on an ambulance and you could also be a private service that partners or contracts with a certain municipality or area these ones are all usually going to be responding to calls in the community it's a very traditional path to take now like i said in my pay video the pay range for these varies depending on where you are or what service you work for now a lot of people get stuck in kind of bad services that do not pay well you know we have paramedics making pretty close to minimum wage and emts right there with them but if you find the right service you can make into the six figure range as an emt or paramedic i've said this before is i feel like i've been very well compensated in my career you just have to do your homework and really build your resume to a point where you can apply for these higher tier services that pay better and take care of you as an employee don't be that person that gets stuck at a low paying service gets really burnt out and doesn't do anything about it if you're unhappy where you are you should probably look at moving now moving on to more of the non-traditional and we're going to start at what i would say are the more common non-traditional roles and then move into the things the really specialty items on this list i've gathered so the next one that's pretty common and this is open to both emts or paramedics is going to be an emergency room technician now in a lot of places hospitals are discovering that paramedics are actually very useful in the er as techs or as even filling the nursing role mainly because we're trained to operate with autonomy and we also have advanced airway skills and we have the ability to interpret rhythms on a monitor without any additional training and enact pals and acls protocols which is pediatric advanced life support and advanced cardiac life support both put on by the aha so there are some places on the east coast that have almost completely changed their er makeup to be just paramedics and they might have one or two nursing supervisors but that's it that's a little bit less common so where i'm at in colorado we have er techs and they're both emts and paramedics and they basically go into the room they might triage the patient they'll get an iv established they'll draw labs they'll get an ekg going they'll give some basic medications and then in your resuscitations or your traumas that come in they'll be an integral part of that team whether that's using the monitor doing airway adjuncts running to get things you name it now they do generally work under the nursing staff there so they're kind of in a support role in that sense but the pay for it is usually pretty comparable to street paramedics it has a little bit more regular hours and then you are in that hospital environment so if you're looking at taking that next step going pa school medical school something like that this is a great time to get that face to face with the physicians and the pas get some good letters of recommendation out of it or if that's just something you enjoy you can stay there there's nothing wrong with that next on the list you have contract medics now contract medics are paramedics and emts that are employed by an agency such as amphibious medics or you have adventure medics there's a whole slew of these companies out there they employ you and then they dispatch you out throughout the country to work on special jobs now these assignments can be as short as a couple days if it's a set medic work where you're on a movie set or it might be a couple months to a couple years when we start talking about the overseas contracts or some of the temporary paramedic positions they might put you in now these can encompass a huge number of different assignments some of the most common we're looking at are going to be event medicine so places like coachella or these big music festivals they'll have paramedics on standby and usually the event will contract with somebody like adventure medics or amphibious medics and they will send their staff over to work that for however long it goes those are on the shorter end of these contracts then you get into things like oil rigs so these are your offshore medics and this is going out to an oil rig they generally work rotations such as two weeks on two weeks off month on month off you know six months on six months off so you have huge blocks of work where you're working really hard you make a fair amount of money and then you get sent back and these can be pretty reoccurring to the point where it might even be considered a full-time job for you so that's one option now one of the really cool things about the offshore medics is that you don't generally need to live on the coastline because you have such big blocks of time you're working a lot of people choose to live inland we have people in colorado that then just fly to the coast and then catch their puddle jumper or helicopter out to their oil rig when it's time for them to go so it really kind of expands your ability to work wherever you want or live wherever you want and then have a humongous commute to work now along those same lines are going to be your oversea contracts so these are going to be your military contractors a lot of these do require some tactical or military experience beforehand and then in addition to that they like you to have your paramedic certification it's pretty rare that you would be sent overseas on a medical assignment with only your emt so what i would suggest in this case is that you have some of that experience and you get into it now you can make a ton of money you can make way past six figures um going overseas but these assignments are generally pretty long and they're not always the most desirable locations um there are some really high tier medical contracts overseas and these are generally going to be filled by people with special operations experience so you know your ex-navy seals uh pjs if you are ever a pj the world's your oyster you can go pretty much work wherever you want for these contracts but you can definitely find something that fits your skill set along those same lines you do have some training opportunities to go overseas and train operators in medical aid so you get that money but you're not really doing a lot of frontline work in those cases in addition to that we have fireline medics so fireline medics are doing things like i was doing a couple weeks ago where the forest service deploys you out to a fire line you do generally two week deployments you can extend those by seven days to make it a 21 day deployment out there and you basically get paid the entire time you're there it's pretty good money and you can do this in two ways one you can register yourself as a single resource you're going to need your red card which is something that allows you to be on the fire line pretty easy certifications to get you can just google it and almost every state will have one and you then you register your resource and you will get selected by the federal government and they will send you all over the country to help support these fires the other way to do it and the way i've done it is that you get involved with an agency that has a fireline contingent so a lot of different fire departments will have these because they're good money makers for them some ems agencies will have them so in our area denver health has a set of them uc health has a set of medics that go out and pretty much every fire department will send firefighters and paramedics out to these fires so that's another option for you i will say with that that you can be an emt or paramedic they generally like that als kit you'll make a lot more money uh if you're als capable but we do generally have bls fire line medics on these calls or on these incidences and they do a pretty good job if you're looking for wilderness medical experience right out of school this is a pretty good place to get it that being said i would recommend having some experience because you're kind of thrown to the wolves and you don't have a lot of support while you're out there so when stuff hits the fan it's going to go really bad really quick now that's a large majority of the contract jobs there are a lot more things out there you know there's a lot of odd jobs and things you can look into in that i would recommend just doing your own research it's as quick as a quick google search for contract medics event medics set medics wilderness medics and you can find job listings uh throughout the internet so i would highly encourage you to do your own research there now those are kind of different separate jobs you can take initially the next section i want to talk more about the jobs that you can build on so jobs that will require some street medic experience that might be in addition to street medic duties but that do kind of encompass different roles than your standard 911 or ift paramedic or emt so the first one and the one that i'm probably most familiar with is going to be the swap medic role i get a lot of messages saying like hey how do i become a swat medic i really want to do this i have no idea where to begin and my answer is always i don't know anything about the area you're in it's very regional dependent on what kind of resources you have now i will tell you a job as a full-time swap medic those are insanely rare and you do not find them in many places florida has a number of them i think probably the most notorious would be the uh lasd seb medics that are part of their swat team then they specialize as paramedics and they fly in that jolly green giant that humongous helicopter those guys are all full-time it will take you probably about 12 years on the job to get onto that team and most of those guys have some special operations backgrounds prior to getting on the la sheriff's office so that's one option there now what i do is i am a on a special team on a full-time service so i work as a paramedic a normal paramedic while i'm actually in the education division but i was on the street and then we get called so we have trainings regularly and then if somebody gets lost in the mountains there's a dive rescue there's a swap mission we get deployed from our regular job to assist in that role but we are not full-time before i came here i was actually a paramedic at a service and then i was a reserve deputy sheriff at the sheriff's office and i was completely separate from my full-time paramedic job at the sheriff's office i was on the team but once again that was not a full-time role a majority of my time spent doing that especially in training was just volunteer so i have never been a full-time uh swat paramedic and that is something that exists but it is pretty hard to get into if you're looking at that i would highly recommend getting military experience prior to going into it because that will only aid you in your application process now a bunch of people ask me if i do want to get into swap medicine and i want to be part of a law enforcement agency what should i do first paramedic law enforcement that's going to really depend on you and how you want to proceed so generally what i tell people is that paramedic is a hard thing to get through if you're working full time somewhere else it's a huge time commitment almost two years of school work and ride time so unless you have an absolutely awesome employer that is willing to pay you for that time or give you all that time off i would recommend going to paramedic school getting some experience on whatever 911 services in your area and then start applying for law enforcement agencies there you should look for a law enforcement agency that has a pre-existing swat team that has the roles that you want you might have to start at a smaller agency before you can get on with the bigger agency you're actually looking for but the best thing you can do in these situations is start talking to people there might not be a thames component in your area a tactical ems component so you might just have to talk to people and it might be something you end up creating yourself so you really have to know what's in your region now uh one great way if you are really interested in tactical medicine it goes back to those contractor roles or military so you can go into the army get your 68 whiskey as an mos and now that is gonna be like an emt basic at its core but then they up train to do a ton of different things like intubation pain medication um and some very advanced skills unfortunately when you come back to the civilian world the 68 whiskey only translates into an emt basic so you'd still have to go to paramedic school if you do want to take that next step now uh one that's like commonly fought or sought after by paramedics is going to be your flight medic position now you cannot come out of school and land yourself on a helicopter right right there that doesn't happen it doesn't exist it's not something you can do you have to have for a caim's accredited agency at least three years of paramedic experience they generally want to see at a busy 911 service so that is key is getting that ground experience and i will tell you it's a very small community so don't come out and be an ass don't come out and think that you can just kind of twiddle your thumbs on the ground ambulance and be lazy and then somehow get onto a flight medic service you need to be a good employee and a good street medic before you can make the transition to flights one thing that i will say about fights is that the certifications you can get that will kind of help you on that are going to be your fpc which is your flight paramedic board exam very difficult test but after all you can just study on your own and paid to take the test it's like 350 dollars take the test that gives you that little check box in your application and usually that's just a foot in the door but it's generally looked at as an expectation prior to flights if you're in a state that has a recognized critical care program you can go do a critical care course i've gone through the creighton course which was excellent and that just prepares you more for that side of things with the prolonged field care and some of the more in-depth knowledge once again though before you even take those courses i'd become a good paramedic because that just builds on everything you know and if you don't have a good foundation you're not going to be successful in that role um now coming into the probably the more rare and it's kind of a stepping stone i'm trying to stay away from talking about using ems as a stepping stone because this is a profession this is something that you can make a living off of and i really want to just drive that home but the fbi will actually hire you as a paramedic so you'd go in you apply to be a special agent which is what almost everybody becomes once they enter the fbi and then if you have your paramedic cert when you come out of that you'll be a fbi special agent paramedic which means that you can be assigned to one of their swat teams as a swat medic you can be assigned to one of their hazardous material response teams or any number of special teams that they employ so that is one road you can go down now fbi is a pretty uh sought after job so there is a lot of competition there and once again i'd recommend having some either law enforcement or paramedic experience prior to applying to help your chances the most last but not least and i have to put a plug into it because it's what my full-time job is is an ems educator pretty much every community college will employ educators they generally pay pretty well in those cases now i'm lucky enough to be in an education role in a large department itself so i'm not associated with college and what i really like about that is that i maintain my clinical competency i still pick up shifts on the truck i'm still part of the special operations response team i still do all of that but my regular job is going out and helping my peers and doing educational lessons and teaching acls pals amoles ph tls and all of the alphabet suits soup certifications that were required to maintain so ems education is something that you can definitely get into now the old adage those who can't do teach does hold true in some circles and i do not want you to become that person so don't go into ems and dislike it or not do good at it and then decide hey i don't like this i'm going to get off the truck and become an educator because you're not going to be a good educator to be good in education you need to have a really solid foundation of ems skills and you have to know pretty much all the material way past what a normal paramedic would just so you can relay that information and give some of the whys behind the whats now this list that i have gone through is far from encompassing there are probably hundreds of different things that i didn't mention and people are going to be in the comments saying like well what about this what about this how do i do this i can't tell you how to do each one of these because it changes throughout the nation yes i'm sure there's opportunities and if there's not and you see the need for it start a business contract yourself do something like you can start these programs they're not completely inaccessible and the need for pre-hospital providers really has never been higher in this nation one thing you should start honing as a professional is your ability to kind of seek out some of this information um google is a great tool for you uh pretty much all of this that i got here is either from my own experience or from googling the answers and figuring out what the different opportunities are out there i'll try to leave links to some of the different organizations that i listed here and then anybody else i can find there are a couple instagram pages that have job boards contract job boards you can i think pay to to get on board with those are a great resource as well and like i keep on preaching is reach out to people talk to people talk to people that are in the roles that you want to do you know even the guys like on lasd or these elite teams a lot of times if you just reach out to them they'll give you their whole life story and how they got where they were so don't be afraid to interface in that regard and then it also gives you something somebody that pulls for you when you are applying for that position they know you they see their name they go to their superior officers say hey this person's dialed in i want them on the team and a lot of times that's how hiring decisions are made so with that being said if you have questions leave them in the comments down below i'll try to answer as many as i can and i will see you next week you

Channel: PrepMedic

Views: 214,998

Keywords: EMS, PARAMEDIC, Medic, EMT, 911, Careers, career, job, get a job, ambulance, swat, swat medic, tactical medic, flight paramedic, flight medic, med, sar, search and rescue, street medic, night vision, government contract, contractor, military contractor, mil

Id: EwugV8oy5IY

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020