Fall in Love With a New Career as an EKG Technician

You may have been taught to keep your business ventures separate from matters of the heart, but what if your job is all about the heart? If you focus your work on cardiovascular health with a career as an EKG technician, you could easily fall in love with this new career.

Do you find yourself attracted to helping patients and performing meaningful work? Are you passionate about helping others? Would you love to work a job that’s in high demand?

A career as an EKG technician might be right for you. To help you discover whether you’re a perfect match for this career, we’ll answer all your burning questions about EKG work: What does an EKG technician do? How can I become an EKG tech? Do I need an EKG technician certification, and how do I get one? What’s an electrocardiography technician’s average salary? Read on to better acquaint yourself with the EKG technician’s role and decide whether it sets your heart aflutter.

What does an EKG technician do?

Electrocardiograph also referred to as EKG or ECG technicians operate equipment that monitors and graphically traces the heart’s electrical activity in a process called electrocardiography.

What is the purpose of electrocardiography? In short, it records the electrical signal from the patient’s heart. Doctors and physicians use the resulting graph — called the electrocardiogram, the EKG, or the ECG — to diagnose and keep tabs on their patients’ heart problems.

In their work, EKG technicians primarily perform electrocardiograms, but they also conduct various tests on a patient’s heart or lungs. To set up these tests, technicians attach electrodes to the patient’s limbs and chest, have the patient either rest or engage in physical activity such as treadmill walking, monitor the readings from the equipment, and report on the results.

These technicians can perform a number of other duties necessary for diagnostic preparation, procedures, and reporting. These tasks include preparing patients for procedures, answering patients’ questions about the procedures, recording the patient’s medical history, preparing the diagnostic imaging equipment, reviewing images or test results for quality, identifying relevant diagnostic information such as abnormal images, recording any findings, and helping physicians during the procedures to ensure they run smoothly.

How to become an EKG tech

To become an EKG technician, you need a high school diploma or GED certificate. In Florida, most workplaces hiring EKG technicians require or encourage certification, and succeeding in passing an EKG certification exam typically requires completing a formal training program or accruing other hands-on training.

How to get EKG technician certification

Once you’ve completed a formal EKG training program, you can sit for a national certification exam. Your options include the National Healthcareer Association’s Certified EKG Technician exam and the American Education Certification Association’s provisional Certified EKG Technician Specialist exam. Though most states don’t regulate EKG technicians’ professional practice, EKG certification will help you fulfill potential employers’ requirements, earn better salaries and job roles over time, and increase your knowledge and skill.

Once you have training and certification under your belt, you can search for jobs with titles such as certified EKG technician, EKG technician, ECG technician, cardiac monitor technician, cardiographic technician, telemetry technician, rhythm analysis technician, and biomedical equipment technician. These are all synonymous or related job roles you might align well with.

How much do EKG techs make?

As with many jobs in the healthcare field, the demand for EKG technicians is projected to grow over time, as will the job opportunities. EKG technician salaries vary from one state or region to another, but the national average is $41,388 per year, according to ZipRecruiter. Skill level, location, and experience will all play a role in the potential salaries EKG technicians can earn.

Becoming an EKG tech

With our medical assistant program at Hollywood Institute, you can learn all the skills you need to fall in love with a career as an EK technician in a matter of months, not years. Our certified medical assistant program teaches the skills necessary for phlebotomy (or blood drawing), EKG work, basic life support, and certified clinical medical assistant duties. Students of this course learn electrocardiography techniques with CPR, patient relations and communication, laboratory procedures, phlebotomy techniques, anatomy and physiology. And they undergo clinical externships that prepare them for full-time work. Beyond that, we offer career placement assistance for students who have completed their studies and are ready for work. With perfect attendance in our 900-hour program, you could learn all of these skills in as little as eight months. Are you ready to fall in love with a career as an EKG technician? Request information today to discover your future with our medical assistant education program.