Take A Guided Tour of the Allied Health Field

EBSCOlearning’s AlliedCareer is an e-learning platform that provides adults or older teens curious about a career in allied health—that is, the broad range of health professions other than doctors, nurses, and dentists—a guided exploration of the current employment landscape. In particular, it focuses on allied health jobs that don’t require advanced degrees, such as medical biller and coder, respiratory therapist, and pharmacy technician, as they're practiced in the United States and Canada.

Product Overview/Description

AlliedCareer uses a personality and preferences quiz to match the user to two or three allied health fields. If the matches from the assessment don’t appeal, the user can retake the assessment or navigate directly to the information page for any of the 20 included fields. For each field, AlliedCareer provides details on three or more specific jobs. The site is designed for users to explore on their own and is optimized for mobile devices.

User Experience

If your experience with EBSCO has been limited to its databases, prepare for something different. AlliedCareer is part of EBSCOlearning, a collection of academic skills training and career-related resources. Subscriptions for AlliedCareer and its sibling product, BlueCareer, are managed by EBSCO, but the interface is developed by AlliedRecruit, a third-party company whose allied health recruiting platform supports some of the information in AlliedCareer (though it is not part of the AlliedCareer product). The user does not create searches to retrieve citations or articles. Instead, a landing page offers three routes into the product’s content:

• “Exploring” (for users interested in identifying an appropriate healthcare career)
• “Interested” (for users who want information about how to get started in a particular career)
• “Experienced” (for allied health professionals looking for a job)

A fourth link, “I don’t need a job. I need to hire,” takes potential employers to a recruiter log-in screen (Figure 1).

The first two options, “Exploring” and “Interested,” are the core of AlliedCareer. “Experienced” and the recruiter resource comprise the AlliedRecruit platform.

I clicked on “Exploring” and made my way through a set of 30 questions designed to identify what types of allied health work might be most appealing based on the user’s personality and likes/dislikes (Figure 2).

To restart the questionnaire, I could click on the back arrow on a question page or the back arrow on the browser. At the end of the assessment, I was presented with two suggestions of fields to investigate: Mental Health and Pharmacy (Figure 3).

Each field has its own information page, which the user can reach by taking the assessment or by clicking directly on “Interested” and choosing from a list. Questions alluding to dogs in the assessment had made me curious: I checked out the page for Veterinary in addition to my matches.

Each information page starts with an overview of the field followed by details—average hourly pay, demand for employees, and training/certification expectations—for several specific jobs (Figure 4). Here, AlliedCareer draws on employer-supplied data from AlliedRecruit, which means the information provided represents the current state of the field.

Scrolling down, the user sees a list of certifications frequently required in the field, followed by a section that describes different places where members of the field might be employed (Figure 5). According to the platform’s designers, they wanted to emphasize that allied health work was not limited to hospitals and medical offices. For example, phlebotomy professionals might work at research facilities, dental professionals at schools, and first responders in wilderness areas.

A section titled “Learn the Day to Day” links to articles, YouTube videos (captioned in English, Spanish, and French), Instagram profiles, and podcasts that provide examples of real-world individuals working in the selected field (Figure 6). These resources take the user off the AlliedCareer site to the respective media platforms but have all been carefully selected by the AlliedCareer team.

At this point, the content shifts from helping users assess whether the field appeals to helping them figure out how to pursue it.

Under “Where to Go From Here?” users can compare the schooling, degree, and timeline for three to four job titles (Figure 7). Short videos under the “Learn More” links go into further detail about the training and duties of each position and describe how they differ. The videos also discuss the challenges of different fields—for example, the physical demands of sonography, the need, in the mental health field, to work with patients in crisis, or the possibility that veterinary technicians will have to work nights and weekends. These videos offer auto-generated captions in English.

Scrolling further, the user comes to “Create Your Own Career Path,” where they are prompted to provide information, about, for example, certifications specific to their home state and skills they are bringing from previous work. Figure 8 shows the form along with my answers for a career in my Mental Health match.

Based on this information, an AI tool suggests a personalized path by which the user can progress from where they are now to the selected career, then to their eventual career goal.

Finally, the user is directed to AlliedCareer’s Schools and Scholarships pages, where they can search for training programs and funding relevant to their state or province and field of interest. The schools listed have been vetted by AlliedRecruit, and the list of scholarships is actively maintained.

There is no search function; if a user wants to learn about a specific job, they will need to know or guess the field it falls under. In most cases, it's fairly clear—for example, dental hygienist is in the Dental field. But for positions in the sonography/imaging field and possibly the rehabilitation field, it may be less clear (Figure 9).

At any point, even during the assessment, users can click the house symbol in the upper right corner to get to a dashboard that includes a link to any saved suggested fields, the list of fields pictured above, a list of in-demand allied health jobs by state, the “Create Your Own Career Path” tool, and pages with tips about working in allied health.

An account is required to save post-assessment matches or “create Your Own Career Path” results. An AlliedCareer account is not the same as an AlliedRecruit profile, which is only for job seekers.

The separation between AlliedCareer and the free AlliedRecruit employment site is not conspicuous. Users determined to explore fully (and librarians trying to kick all the tires on their new purchase) can accidentally find themselves in AlliedRecruit, where they are prompted to create a job seeker profile. Librarians in particular should be aware that the AlliedRecruit profile is not like the personal account in EBSCO databases and will not give users any additional access or options in AlliedCareer; it is only for people who are ready to be hired for an allied health position.

Accessibility

The site employs the UserWay accessibility widget, which enables options such as dyslexia-friendly text, a larger cursor, and link highlighting.

AlliedCareer is currently working on an audit from a third party in pursuit of its Vendor Product Accessibility Template (VPAT). The recommendations should be implemented by June 2025, at which point EBSCOlearning intends for the platform to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and be ADA-compliant.

Contracting and Pricing Provisions

According to EBSCO, pricing for libraries is based on a variety of factors including population served, existing EBSCO subscriptions, and consortium agreements and/or buying groups, and is subject to change based on royalty requirements or other factors.

The license allows individual users to print or save information from their sessions and subscribing institutions to use printed or downloaded materials in course packs or class handouts or as info sheets in counseling offices.

Authentication Models

AlliedCareer integrates with EZproxy and OpenAthens. Other integrations, such as Single Sign-On and OpenID Connect (OIDC), are available for an implementation fee.

Competitive or Related Products

While there do not appear to be other subscription resources about careers in allied health, some free resources are available. Of these, only one, from AlliedHealthPrograms.com, provides any kind of assessment to match users with potential fields. Its assessment questions are less relevant than AlliedCareer, for example: “True/False: I really care about my work and when I see others not pulling their weight, I can feel annoyed.”

Additionally, its assessment results do not link to the corresponding information pages. The information pages on AlliedHealthPrograms.com have more information about the likely curricula of training programs but lack the day-in-the-life elements that AlliedCareer includes.

For careers in the skilled trades, EBSCO also provides access to BlueCareer. BlueCareer was AlliedRecruit’s original product and the source of the design for AlliedCareer.

Critical Evaluation

AlliedCareer offers a higher-quality exploration of the allied health field than any free resource. The friendly assessment quiz provides a gentle starting point by focusing on potential good matches. The combination of practical considerations, such as salary and requirements, with the experiential aspects illuminated by the videos and Instagram accounts provides a balanced picture of each field. Every job is going to have some rough days and it’s helpful to know beforehand whether the ways those days are rough are dealbreakers.

Librarians or other personnel connecting users with AlliedCareer may need to advise users against creating an AlliedRecruit unless they are actively seeking employment.

Recommendation

AlliedCareer is a unique and valuable tool for anyone actively considering the field of allied health or exploring career options generally.

Its target subscriber audience includes public libraries and career counseling programs. For academic libraries, it would be of most use for community colleges and undergraduate programs, especially institutions that offer coursework in some of the careers covered. At such institutions, the library and the counseling office may wish to collaborate on product licensing and promotion.