Radiologic Technologist Career Options Nobody Told You About

20 Year multimodality Radiologic technologist and founder of a staffing company, among other things. And I'm somebody who believes your badge as a medical imaging professional is just the beginning.

Today I need to talk to you about something that has been sitting with me because I keep seeing the same thing happen to incredibly skilled technologists and professionals in imaging, incredibly dedicated technologists as well. And somebody's naming it out loud. It's not burnout. It's not that you chose the wrong field in healthcare. It's not that you're not ambitious enough.

It's that someone handed you a menu with three items on it and you've been ordering from that same menu for years. Not because it's all that you wanted, but because you didn't know that.

Because you didn't know that there were 40 other things on the back of that menu. This is where we're getting it. That's what we're going to talk about today. Get comfortable with less talk.

So you've been in medical imaging, radiology technology long enough to watch a pattern repeat itself.

Smart techs, dedicated technologists, technologists with multiple certifications, tons of experience, years of degrees, and at some point they hit the same wall. The wall is not ability, the wall is vision. Not their vision, but the vision they've been handed.

You see, when most of us got into imaging, somebody showed us three doors, management, travel, or, or just keep scanning. That was the whole building as far as we knew it. You did the same thing early on. You looked at the people ahead of you.

You mapped your options based on what you saw or what you could see. And what you could see was limited, not because you were not looking hard enough, but because nobody had built a bigger map yet.

And here is what I want to talk about today. Because this is not a character flaw. This, this is a curriculum gap. Let me show you what I mean.

So I want you to think about the career conversations you actually have at work and have had at work, who you had them with. Your lead technologist, maybe your director, if you're fortunate. And what do they tell you?

Management, Track travel or cross training to another modality for a pay bump. That was the conversation. That was actually the whole conversation. Nobody walked in and said, have you ever thought about being a PACS administrator?

What about application specialist roles? What, what about radiology? Informatics, imaging, Informatics, education, sales, staffing, entrepreneurship? The list goes on and on.

It's not because these roles didn't exist, because they absolutely exist, but the person giving you career advice Was also working with an incomplete menu as well. And this is generational. The incomplete menu. It gets passed down from generation to generation of technologists. Right?

A director who was never shown a full, full picture advises a technologist or therapist who has never shown a full picture, who eventually becomes the director who advises the next generation. That gap doesn't close unless someone breaks the cycle. So you're not behind. You just haven't been shown the whole building.

So let's be real about something. Hospitals are not career development centers. They are operations. They need positions filled. They need coverage.

Your growth was never the primary concern of the institution. Even. Even if you loved your manager and even if your director was fantastic. I had some great ones. The system wasn't built for your expansion.

It wasn't built much differently either. Radiologic technology programs are built to prepare you for entry level clinical work and pass the boards. That's just the honest truth.

Career strategy was not in the curriculum. Nobody's program had a class called here's everything. Here's everything you can do with this degree beyond the scan room.

And so we graduated, we got our credentials, we went to work. We built our entire sense of what was possible based on what we could see in the departments where we worked. Right?

This is not about blaming hospitals or programs at all. This is about understanding the gap. You can stop filling in with the wrong conclusion, which is that something is wrong with you. Totally false.

Nothing is wrong with you. The menu just was incomplete. But here's what made it worse. While we were working from limited set of options, a lot of us were also waiting.

I know I was one of them. Waiting for the opportunity to present itself. Waiting for someone in leadership to say, I see you. Hey, I see what you're capable of.

Let me show you what else is out there. That tap never came for most of us. And when it did not come, we started to wonder if we were the problem. I want to say this very clearly.

That tap did not come because the person who was supposed to give it was also working from an incomplete menu. Your director was not holding out on you. Your lead was not keeping secrets.

They genuinely could not show you a door that they had never walked through themselves. This is the part that used to make me so frustrated. Now it just makes me focused.

Because if nobody's going to hand you the full map, someone has to build it. That is what this podcast is all about. This is what this work is.

Not because I have a figure, not because I have it all figured out, but because I went looking for the rest of the menu and. But because I went looking for the rest of the menu and I want to show you what I found over the 20 plus years in medical imaging.

So let's actually talk about the full menu and what it looks like because I just don't want to tell you the problem. Right. I want to show you what has been sitting in the back of the kitchen this whole time. Walk through.

So for our first one, I'm going to talk about application specialists and clinical application roles with imaging vendors. I've done this for many years as a contractor. I didn't work for a specific company. I had my own company and I was privileged to be able to do this.

I also did training at Siemens headquarters that I paid for for myself. Now I also there with other technologists whose companies paid for them to go to this training.

That's a little tidbit of information I want to share with those of you who are listening. But application specialists and clinical education roles are out there now. They are not for everyone.

So you want to make sure that you understand these roles.

But this is an advanced role where you can take the skills that you've learned throughout years as a medical imaging professional and you can use them in a different field within medical imaging.

Again, leveraging your expertise, your skills that you already know, that you garnered all of these years in medical imaging from that degree that you got and now parlay it into application specialists. It does require traveling, a lot of traveling. So if that doesn't fit your lifestyle, this may not be the role for you.

But I encourage you at least do some research and figure out is this an applications role that maybe takes me away for two days a week or is it five days a week or am I going maybe once a month? At least interview for it, at least educate yourself about the actual role of application specialists and clinical education specialists.

Because they can be two different things. Clinical education roles, you can be work for a vendor and you create the clinical education.

Maybe you don't have to go out to a client like a hospital. And that's why I say don't always think everything that you see other people showing on social media, clinical apps.

I'm going to be traveling forever. But clinical education roles can fall in hospitals. I've seen hospitals actually hire for these roles.

They want you to be the educator for their imaging departments, putting together education seminars, conferences for the whole imaging department, especially big hospitals.

So if you're working for a large hospital, why not inquire about clinical education roles that will cut down on you having to worry about is this a travel position? PACS administrator and imaging informatics. This is a profession that when I started over 20 years ago, PACs didn't exist.

So I remember when it started I was like, what is it? Nobody kind of knew what it was. But now everybody knows what PACS is and it has maybe not a lot of jobs compared to X ray or their modalities.

But these jobs are out there and many of you are already doing packs work. You understand how it works. You definitely understand imaging. The informatics part.

I remember informatics was just for nursing, but now they need imaging informatics that is specific to us. And I would encourage you to maybe start looking for jobs like that.

Even if you're not looking for a job right now, look within your institution and start talking around asking, do we have a PACS administrator? Getting to know the PACS administrator, understanding what they do, there's no harm in doing that. That's actually educating you.

Maybe for future roles. I've seen institutions where they had one PACS administrator or one imaging informatics, technologist and specialist.

It grew so much to where this person was so bogged down they needed an extra technologist.

Imagine if you started investigating and learning more about it and preparing yourself and one day your institution needed a second or a third technologist to fill one of these roles. You're already ready. Healthcare number three healthcare sales and account management. This is huge.

Many of you are graduating already with a bachelor's degree in something else and you got into medical imaging. Many of these roles with sales or the tech aspect require that you have a bachelor's degree. You've already fulfilled that.

Some of you are graduating from bachelor's imaging programs. Medical imaging programs. This can help you once you get a little experience, parlay into sales. Not all sales jobs are commission.

Not all are traveling a lot. So I would encourage you start looking at these jobs. Number four, leadership pipelines that are not just managing people.

And I have to say that because most people think leadership and management automatically means managing people. That's not always a leadership role. So as you start to look for leadership roles, don't count them out that oh, I don't want to manage people.

I get you at some point. If you're managing everything in your household, you don't want to come to work and have to manage people any again.

So you're already managing at your household. Having to manage at work can be a lot. So look for leadership roles that don't require that you manage people.

They are out There one of the ways you can get leadership training and mentorship is to make sure you are a member of some of the imaging societies. Definitely get in those they do help. There are scholarships at your local associations for medical imaging professionals.

They that help you get into leadership roles and connect with leadership roles that don't manage people. And of course I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the next opportunity which is travel imaging or per diem strategy.

These are all opportunities for you to leverage your to leverage your degree in medical imaging. Traveling for some people is perfect.

They get to work three months out of the year or six months out of the year or even pick shifts that they just want. I just talked to a fellow technologist who's been doing this for over 30 years and she's on the wind down of her her career.

She told me the other day I love doing contract work with the hospitals. So what she's doing is picking up shifts here and there with hospitals.

They actually have their own contracting system instead of using the big contracting companies and they are running their own traveler travelers or contract workers through the hospital which means you don't have to commit to full time hours. The pay will be a little higher. You can be more flexible in your schedule. So the point is not that you need to do all of these.

The point is that you deserve to know they exist before you decide what your next move is going to be. Choosing from three options when 40 exists is not a career strategy and it's actually just a limitation. And limitations came from the outside of you.

So I want to leave you with this. The career mistakes most medical imaging and radiologic technologists make are making our making is not ambition. It's not passion, it's not a skill.

It's working from an incomplete menu and not knowing the rest of it exists or how to get there. If you've been feeling stuck, if management does not excite you, travel is not realistic right now for you and more shifts is not the answer.

That feeling is not failure. This is just what it feels like when the menu you've been given doesn't match the appetite you have. The menu is bigger than what you were shown.

That's not a motivational statement. That is true. That's true.

I spent over 20 years in this field and many of you, many more years and I'm still finding out options I didn't know existed when I started. It's, it's amazing. Your next move is not about starting over. Let's clear that up.

It's about seeing the full picture of what your credentials, what your degree, what your experience and your skill still actually do. You're not stuck. You just have to be shown all your options. You just have. You just haven't been shown all the options that you have yet. So this com.

So this conversation is hitting home. Take the free career pivot assessment at the link in the show notes. It takes three minutes.

Just seven questions and it'll show you exactly where you are and what your next move could be. I built it for the technologist and therapist who knows something has to shift but is just not sure what yet. 3 Minutes. The link is right there.

And that's the wrap of another episode of a couple of rad techs. If this episode hit different do me a favor, share it with one technologist who needs to hear it. Leave a review if you have. Not yet.

It really helps the channel helps us to be seen as well. It helps more people find this show. And that's the whole point. I'm Sean. You've been listening to a couple of rad texts.

Now go out there and be more than your modality. See you next time.