HCS 449 Week 4 Individual Professional Career Action

In addition to the personal goals you set in Week Three, this week you will be setting professional career goals. These are goals that relate to your chosen career, what type of job you want, and what steps you need to take to secure that job. These include gaining skills to include on your resume and a look at what hiring managers will focus on. You will do a gap analysis, where you identify the skills you currently posses and those you need to posses in your chosen career. This will help prepare you for job searches and interviews.

Review the American Council for Health Care Executives (ACHE) Career Management 101 workshop site. A link is provided on the student website.

Create a professional career plan using the University of Phoenix Material: Professional Career Action Plan Outline.

Write a 1,400- to 1,750-word paper, based on your action plan outline, addressing the following questions:

What are your professional goals?

What job do you plan to have in the health care sector?

What skills for this job do you currently have?

Which skills do you need to change or alter?

What is your plan for ultimately achieving these professional goals?

What professional organizations can help you achieve these goals?

What benefit does your career action plan outline provide?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.