Caregivers are the individuals who offer emotional support as well as physical care to the patients who are unable to take care of themselves due to reasons like severe illness, disability, or injury. These caregivers are specialised to provide assistance in daily life activities, other than medical care. Becoming a caregiver is the best opportunity for those who want to grow in their career by helping people that are struggling with their day-to-day activities and looking for assistance.Caregivers are helping their clients to accomplish daily activities like grooming, feeding, taking medication, and some other domestic work. If you want to grab the same role, a top-notch resume is your first step towards the goal. Below provided are three impeccable resume samples, followed by an entire guide to help you craft one.
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Job duties of a Caregiver
A caregiver acts as the right hand of people who are helpless to do daily routine activities. Caregivers usually help senior citizens, patients suffering from illness, and people recovering from injuries to do their everyday activities. The caregiver’s duties and responsibilities vary from individual to individual, depending upon the care and assistance required.
Although the list of duties is quite long for caregivers, but here are few of them that care recipients carry on:
Assisting patients with routine activities including eating, bathing, dressing, grooming, medicating, and many other related to the situation..
Supporting clients for physical therapy exercises and motivating them to perform their tasks on their own.
Reporting any remarkable incident or behavior. For instance, a client suffering from paralysis is able to talk clearly after a few months.
Supervising the medical dosage as provided by doctors, observing and reporting the health of patients, and promptly reporting all the changes to the doctors for earliest treatment.
Keeping the surroundings safe, clean and orderly for patients to help them adjust to the atmosphere easily.
Recognizing patients needs such as bathing, eating, and many others and fulfilling the same with assuring safety.
Engaging with clients in a way that endorses their ability and decency to become better.
Encouraging patients to consume healthy food and take proper diets and adequate fluid for fast recovery.
Motivating patients to engage socially by making them conduct social activities as defined in their calendar.
Caregiver Median Salaries
According to U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary of caregivers which includes home health and personal care aides is reported as 27, 080 per year. The demand for these caregivers is projected to grow at 34% from 2019 to 2029 due to the increase in the population of baby-boom generation and elderly generation who require assistance to conduct their daily activities.
Top skills for a Caregiver
Caregivers make a true difference in the lives of patients with their ability to provide physical care and emotional support. However, becoming a caregiver requires more than purring a course and getting certifications. It is a skill-based job that requires a strong desire to help other people and ready to handle them in severe and dramatic times. Aspiring caregivers should master both technical as well as soft skill set to secure a position with good pay.There are certain skills required to become a caregiver are as under:
- Life saving/First aid expertise: Professional caregivers are always found by the side of their patients. They need to have proficiency in life saving skills such as CPR and first aid. They should be able to recognize when the patient is undergoing a threatening emergency such as heart attack, chronic illness which requires adequacy and reliability in determining the symptoms. With the expertise in life and first aid skills, the caregivers will be able to cure their patients easily and effectively. Such proficiency can be gained either by undertaking training from a prestigious institute for Life Saving skills and First Aid Certification or work under a professional troop of doctors to learn how to determine the symptoms.
- Safe handling of client documentation: Since caregivers are responsible for managing the health of the patient. So, they should be able to document all the activities related to the health and well being of a patient. The right documentation works as a communication tool for the other doctors for their valuable guidance and also promotes patient safety and quality of care. When the documentation is complete, detailed, and accurate, it avoids ambiguity. So, caregivers should be good at handling client documentation along with their other practices. To gain knowledge of maintaining client documentation, either discuss with your experienced professionals or just undertake any training related to Online Clinical Documentation Training Course.
- Ability of behaviour redirection: Being a caregiver, this becomes one of the critical skills. The caregivers should have the ability to notice behavior or pattern of behaviours in their patients. Seeing this, they should be able to redirect their behaviour from unwanted ones. Redirecting behaviour helps in curing the patients from severe illness. You need to maintain a pleasant and composed tone to handle them and make them understand the importance of it. This strategy can be either gained with your years of experience or you can undertake courses related to it that promotes and helps in adapting to skills for behaviour redirection.
- Compassion towards families and patients: A caregiver is a person who is making daily activities easier for the person trying to get out of the injuries or illness. However, you require to be compassionate about your clients and you should be content by bringing smiles into their lives. Your positive attitude in treating them can help the patient overcome the disease effectively. Therefore, if the caregiver develops compassion and pretends to be confident, it further enables the patient to sync up well and develops belief that they can heal too. So, having compassion towards patients and their families during tough times can help to overcome those serious challenges.
- Strong eye for details: Caregivers are responsible for the overall health of the patient. Right from monitoring the symptoms to the final cure of the disease, they overlook every particular detail for the patients. With good observation skills, they can easily identify any change in pattern or behaviour, report any symptoms, curate a detailed treatment plan, and provide care tailored to their needs. By keeping a constant record of the vital signs, the caregiver can easily compare them with the previous one and convey the same to the doctor easily. This ability is conceived over the years of practice or through some regulated activities such as playing a memory game, recording and considering your observations, challenging yourself with a mental workout and many others.
- Attention and inspection: You need to pay attention to the everyday responsibilities and conditions of your clients. Sometimes patients are unable to express their difficulties or pain exactly or they are trying to conceal it to avoid the pain during the treatment. For instance, any bed-ridden patient with low blood pressure trying to hide the feeling of dizziness to avoid saline water. As a caregiver, you should examine the client’s condition, report the same to a doctor, and act upon his advice.
- Sanitation: You may need to do sanitation at the client’s home like mopping or sweeping even if you’re not performing it at your place. As a candid caregiver, it is important to keep the surroundings of your client neat and clean. This promotes your caring attitude towards patients and helps the patients to recover quickly.
Caregiver education and certifications
As a caregiver, you need to be good at the required skills rather than any formal degree or graduation. However, a high school level or equivalent diploma is demanded to become a caregiver.
Many institutions are providing online training and certificate programs for Caregiver jobs. To get a competitive advantage over other candidates applying for the caregiver jobs, one should get training and certificates from authorized institutes.
High School Diploma or Equivalent
Candidates applying for the caregiver job should have a High School Diploma or any other equivalent education. As a caregiver is a skill-based job, one can directly apply for this job without any degree or university graduation which is subject to the relevant skills. Other than this, the caregivers who are looking to work in a healthcare setting, need to have no less than 75 hours of training as a nursing assistant and should undertake competency exams to prove their eligibility.Certifications
If you complete any certification program which helps you to develop relevant skills and knowledge, then it’s very beneficial for you to be competent. It is also helpful for your clients, as they are served by a certified and skilled person.Since a caregiver job is not for everyone, it’s for individuals who have the desire to help others in hard times. There are various types of certifications for caregivers which one can undertake based on their offering and scope.The Basic Caregiver Certification offered by many online companies such Caregiver’s list Basic Training for Caregivers or Care Core Certifications. This certification teaches you how to coordinate with your patients well and perform daily activities.Then, Certified Nursing Assistant Training which acts as a stepping stone to move towards caregivers career. There are various non-profit organizations offering these certifications such as American Red Cross Nurse Assistant Training or you can refer to a Registered Nursing organization where you can find the details of multiple states offering this training.Other than this is First Aid and Emergency Care, which should be undertaken by every caregiver as it teaches them the essentials of the care such as CPR, First Aid and other related. There are many organizations offering such courses such as American Heart Association offering such courses. Other than this, CPR Certification, First Aid Training, and many others are available.Then there are certifications for caregivers for special needs. Sometimes, caregivers are employed for a particular disease for which they should have a certification of it. This required more specialized care such as Dementia Care Certification, Diabetes Care Certification, and Parkinson’s Disease Care Certification.Other than this, there is An academy for Caregiving Excellence (ACE) is imparting an Assisted Living Caregiver Course which is an online self-paced training and certification program that helps to get a Caregiver job in the state of Arizona. During These 62 hours of training students get access to experienced instructors, helpful videos, and training in the essential skills. You can immediately start the course that provides 10 hours of in-person skills training along with the medication training.
Caregiver resume-writing tips
You can write a caregiver resume in different ways according to your skills, experience, and previous work. The tips given below will provide you the sense to maximize the probability of getting job offers from potential recruiters.
- Particulars of Experience: It is the best practice to give particulars of experience which is relevant to the job post or asked by an employer. Always write down your experience in bullet points. To get a clear idea to the potential recruiter regarding your experience, provide relevant illustrations. For instance, you worked as a caregiver for one year of a patient who was 65 years old and was suffering from Alzheimer.
- Quantify your accomplishments: Avoid using buzzwords and mention your accomplishments with relevant facts and figures. It helps an employer to know about your ability to handle any urgent situation or job stress. Hence, instead of saying that you worked as a caregiver earlier for the client suffering from paralysis, mention that you worked as a caregiver for a year to serve the 65-year-old patient suffering from paralysis. After considering your sincere efforts and significant improvements in the patient due to the same, his relatives gave you a 20% salary hike from the sixth month of joining.
- Bring clarity to your skills section: Incorporate all essential skills that are demanded by the employer. It grabs the attention of a potential recruiter and increases your probability of getting the job. While mentioning the skills, make sure that you added a summary regarding every skill. For example, don’t say that you have the ability of attention and inspection. Instead, mention that you’re able to pay consistent attention to the mental and physical behavior of your client and inspect the decline in the health graph if any.
- Include other segments related to the caregiver position: Adding hobbies and interests in the ‘Other’ segment of your resume makes it unprofessional. To make the best use of that segment, you need to include something that signifies your additional skills to efficiently work as a caregiver. For example, mention that you did a Naturopathy course that helps to amplify the self-healing ability of the human body.
FAQ
What are some crucial elements of a Caregiver’s career?
A caregiver is a person skilled in helping the people suffering from illness, injuries, and serious mental or physical disorders in finishing their daily routine work like bathing, dressing, grooming, feeding, etc.
The minimum educational qualification of a caregiver is a High School education or equivalent Diploma. You have to be a social and helping nature person to become a caregiver.
Will I thrive as a Caregiver in the long haul?
A caregiver is a good career for those who are social, compassionate, and love to help others to come out of annoying conditions like injuries or illness. Hence, if you’re the person who gets content by making other people smile, whoever is struggling with their mental and physical disabilities, then a caregiver is the best career path for you.
There are various avenues like opening your own caregiver agency, working as a caregiver, etc.