By Cat Zemel
Ever thought about how many people in North Carolina now work in healthcare—or are trying to? From community clinics to telehealth startups, the field’s become a magnet for anyone looking to make a stable, meaningful career move. But walking into health work unprepared is like showing up to a marathon in flip-flops. In this blog, we will share what you need to understand before taking your first steps into healthcare.
If the pandemic taught the public anything about healthcare, it’s that the whole system leans hard on people willing to do too much with too little. Those people still show up every day, many of them tired, underpaid, and operating in a state of controlled urgency. When you enter that world, your presence adds weight or relief. There is no neutral.
This isn’t to scare anyone off. It’s to clarify what separates those who thrive from those who fade out early. If you want to make an impact, start by being steady.
For all the idealism wrapped around “helping people,” healthcare runs on systems—messy, overloaded, sometimes outdated systems. Success in the field depends on knowing how those systems move, where they bottleneck, and what keeps them functioning on a busy Tuesday morning when three staff members call out and the patient load doubles.
That’s where formal training becomes more than a box to check. Students aiming to lead in hospitals, health networks, or clinics are increasingly enrolling in MHA programs in nc, like the online Master of Healthcare Administration from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. The degree builds operational and ethical decision-making skills while helping professionals develop into leaders who can manage complexity without losing sight of people. It's not about learning rules for the sake of rules. It's about understanding how every policy, every budget shift, and every staffing decision impacts care.
The better you understand the mechanics of healthcare—billing systems, regulatory constraints, and the slow churn of institutional change—the more prepared you'll be to navigate the work without getting buried in it. Knowledge keeps you from becoming the person who burns out blaming the wrong thing.
Healthcare has a rigid hierarchy on paper, but respect isn’t handed out based on job title alone. What earns it is follow-through, self-awareness, and being someone people want next to them in high-stress moments. You can have the credentials, the degree, even the leadership role, but if you lose composure when things go sideways, that paper trail won’t help you.
Standing out as a newcomer means managing small things without constant oversight. Know how to prep a room, organize your shift, or de-escalate a frustrated patient. And do it without making a production out of it. Quiet competence will take you further than trying to prove how much you know.
Keep in mind that healthcare runs on handoffs—one shift to another, one department to the next. Mistakes and resentment pile up when people stop communicating. Get good at saying exactly what others need to know, not more, not less. It’s a technical field with high emotional stakes, and clarity always wins.
One of the hardest parts of healthcare is not the work itself, but what the work exposes you to. Patients who are scared or angry. Families who are grieving. Colleagues who are stretched too thin to care about your learning curve. It’s not personal. But it does affect you if you don’t develop ways to keep your balance.
No one tells you how to go from seeing someone take their last breath to making small talk in the breakroom ten minutes later. But you will. And the way you manage those transitions will shape your ability to stay in the field long-term.
That doesn’t mean turning off your emotions. It means building an internal routine that lets you hold space for patients without getting swallowed by their experience. Talk to people outside the field. Sleep. Drink water. Laugh about something stupid. Healthcare is serious, but that doesn’t mean you have to carry the weight of every room you walk into.
A final thing worth knowing before you start: health careers are diverse. There are a hundred ways to help people, and not all of them involve direct patient care. You can work in community outreach, data analysis, public health, hospital administration, mental health advocacy—the list is long.
Don’t box yourself in early based on what you think you should be doing. Stay open, especially during training and your first few years. Some of the most effective healthcare professionals started on one path, hated it, pivoted, and found a lane they hadn’t even known existed.
The goal isn’t to be impressive. It’s to be effective. And the best way to do that is to build skills, stay grounded, and remember who the work is for—people, not systems. If you can keep that straight, you'll find your place. And when you do, you won’t just survive healthcare. You’ll make it better.
MBTpg
