Medical assisting is a growing field.  It is one of the few jobs in medicine that has no formal requirements for training.  You don’t HAVE to go to school to become a medical assistant—if you can find an employer who is willing to do on the job training, that is. Most employers will only consider hiring a medical assistant who has had at least some training, so if you can complete at least a semester or two of training in the field, your job prospects will be much better.

After your training, there are two organizations that offer you the chance to take an exam and become “certified” as a medical assistant.  Again, this is not absolutely necessary, but a certification in medical assisting can only help your career prospects and your earnings, so if you can become certified, you may want to do so.  The average medical assistant salary for a person who is certified is about 10% or 20% higher than for a non-certified person holding the same or a similar position.  Since the average earnings for a medical assistant are around $28,000 per year, but range up to around $40,000, if you get your certification it can help you be in the upper end of that range.

Once you have finished whatever schooling you intend to attain, you will need to create or polish your medical assistant resume.  There are many examples available online, but many of them have a fatal flaw that causes potential employers to skip over them, especially in a busy office—they simply have too many pages.  You want to make yourself sound as good as possible on your resume, of course, but you don’t want to weigh it down.  A busy employer simply doesn’t want to read two or three (or four or five!) pages of information about you.  The number one rule: keep it at one page or less.