Part-Time Jobs for Northwestern College Students

One logical consequence of signing up for college is that employers will immediately send candidates enrolled in technical programs to the front of the line for consideration. So, if two people apply for a clerical/reception position in a medical clinic, the office manager or physician in charge will typically be more interested in a candidate currently attending a medical school. Why? In the case of Northwestern College’s Medical Assisting program, the current student will probably become a CMA (Certified Medical Assistant) and the clinic can get a good look at a part-time clerical employee before committing to hiring a professional medical assistant.

Of course, the student who pursues this strategy would need good customer service skills as well as clerical skills (Microsoft Office including Word and Excel and knowing how to type.) The Office of Career Development encourages our medical assisting students to pursue part-time clerical work in neighborhood medical offices, and we help with “forward leaning” resumes that highlight all of the student’s eventual skills. In addition, we teach our students how to utilize the federal employer database at www.careerinfonet.org/employerlocator to enable them to find medical offices in their own zip code.

The same basic strategy applies to our paralegal students. We assist our students in building a forward leaning resume and then identifying law offices in their zip code in which to apply. The same basic reasoning applies on the part of an employer – if we hire a part-time clerical person, eventually this student is going to be a paralegal, and we can promote them once they graduate.

The essential lesson in all this is that as soon as a person signs up for college, they have crossed a major line in their life, and it’s possible to get their college education working in their favor long before they graduate.