Business, leadership skills help to ensure career success

Facility professionals need a wide range of skills and abilities to do their jobs, and these competencies change as a person ascends the career ladder. As a person moves into a management, director or executive position, a facilities professional needs to understand more about budgeting, leadership and communication to ensure career success.  

ASHE has developed several new educational programs to help members expand the financial and leadership skills they need to advance in their careers and achieve success. 

A new online education course, Finance and Budgeting for Facility Managers, shows facilities professionals how to plan budgets, communicate about financial issues with hospital executives and assess the impact of capital budgeting on facilities. It includes an electronic version of the book, The Facility Manager’s Guide to Finance and Budgeting, and ASHE members receive a significant discount on the program. This course can be especially useful to those who want a greater understanding of health care facility finance before taking the Certified Healthcare Facility Manager exam. 

Another new program, Beyond Competency: Health Facility Leadership Skills Development Program, helps members to develop soft skills such as communication and leadership. While there are many generic leadership programs available, this new program is specific to health care facilities professionals. 

Attendees will discuss how to translate the technical information of health care facility operations into language that anyone can understand, and they will have an opportunity to discuss real-life examples with the session leaders and other attendees.

The Beyond Competency program is being held in Salt Lake City in September and also is available as a hosted program, an attractive option for health care organizations or ASHE-affiliated chapters with multiple facility professionals who would benefit from this training. More information about the two educational programs is available under the Events and Education tab on ASHE's website. 

Earlier this year, ASHE also released a monograph to help members develop their careers. That publication, “Promoting the Value of the Facility Department to the C-Suite,” presents strategies facility professionals can use to develop relationships with hospital leaders and demonstrate the value of their work. It includes real-world examples of facility professionals who have successfully shown the value of their departments to organizational leaders. It can be downloaded for free by ASHE members.

Take advantage of these valuable resources as you plan your career path and advance into new roles. 

Deanna Martin is the membership and communications director at the American Society for Healthcare Engineering.

ASHE INSIGHTS

Important monographs available from ASHE

Following are two recently released monographs that can be accessed by ASHE members as free PDFs at the resource library.

• "Roadmap to Resiliency." This monograph summarizes lessons learned from previous disasters, explains how to assess vulnerabilities and suggests new ways to safeguard emergency power through new technologies, innovative protocols and information sharing.
• "Life Safety Code Comparison." Many factors influence whether a health care organization chooses to apply the most recent edition of NFPA 101, Life Safety Code, to a project. This monograph provides an exhaustive list of the differences among the 2012 edition of NFPA 101 and the 2000 and 2009 editions, as well as the 2015 edition of the International Building Code.

Design guidelines available to industry through ASHE

The 2014 editions of the Facility Guidelines Institute’s Guidelines for Design and Construction of Hospitals and Outpatient Facilities and the Guidelines for Design and Construction of Residential Health, Care, and Support Facilities can be purchased at www.ASHEstore.com.