Radiology Career Skills

What are they looking for? Good communication skills. You have to be able to talk to people on a professional level. Patients, doctors, nurses, other radiology technicians, other people that are working in the healthcare system. Personable, good personality because again you’re dealing with the sick. A lot of those patients are very, very ill and we have to be able to give them that comfort when they’re there. Continuing education. Are you showing to your employer that you’re going to be continuing with your education, other courses you can take to better yourself as a technologist? They do look for that: physically fit. Do you have a strong knowledge base? There are some employers that actually quiz people that are applying to the job on how to take X-rays, when you look at the images how do you tell if it’s good or not. There are some employers who do – a lot of them actually – who do quiz you on that type of information.


Critical thinking skills: Can you think your way out of a problem? If you have a patient who’s on the table who all of a sudden is going downhill – is the word I’ll use – but if they start to take a turn for the worst, what do you do? Able to handle high stress situations: I put that in there because I work in a facility that can be that way. The Health Sciences Center is a trauma center. We see, like I said, a lot of drama that you hear a lot on the news: car accidents, you know, stabbings, those types of situations. We see a lot of it at the Health Sciences Center. Not to say you don’t see that at the other sites, but we see a lot of it at our site and they can be high stress situations. We could be involved I that situation. So are you able to be in that type of an environment?