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9. What about schools during that time? Well, since this was not my original pursuit, I was
not made aware of college offerings at that time. In looking back, I do know correspondence
courses were big around that time and my formal electronics training came from that experience. Back then seminars, factory schools, a lot of personal reading and studying were the
extent of my formal education in electronics and healthcare. It took four years of hard study
to get the CBET certification because of my forgotten knowledge of the human body most of
which I had learned in high school and college while pursuing a major in a completely different field. Although IBM had been around for some time with their really big computer
rooms, and the armed services had training facilities, It wasn‘t until the late 70‘s and 80‘s
that your ―average Joe‖ became heavily involved with the electronic computer revolution.
Just a personal opinion, but I don‘t believe there was as much demand for scholastically
trained technicians (other than engineers and consumer electronics) during that era. However, with the advent of software driven equipment and networking today, all of that has
changed! By 1997, when I left the consumer field and entered the Healthcare field, already
software had invaded the biomedical department. The Computer Maintenance Management
Software (CMMS) program Sentinel, by Nevada, was making headway and to this day, I believe it was way ahead of it‘s time. It was an awesome program. Now, with the advent of
Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) and the mandate to be there by 2014, every little
community college is getting on board, and now with online classes taking over the
―correspondence‖ type segment, every adult can get a part of the action. The Job market for
higher educated techs is very promising. You can view the comparison at the ―Bureau of Labor and Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook‖ website.