Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

Career Spotlight: Dental Assisting

Have you always known that you wanted to work in Healthcare, change peoples’ lives, and get to know your community better? Do you want to be a wife and mother who has Fridays off and gets to spend her nights at the ball field watching her children play? Do you want to serve others by providing them with a way to look and feel much better about themselves? Do you want the opportunity to [move up] in your professional career?

If any of the above describe or are desirable to you, then Dental Assisting may be the career path for you!

Education Required: High School Diploma or GED

If you are in high school, always strive to have strong grades and a solid foundation in Science, Math, English (Grammar) and Reading. All subjects will not only prepare you for college, but any kind of post-high school program. As a potential dental assistant, dentists look for someone who can learn quickly and can educate their patients about not just their teeth, but their overall health. The way you articulate and the grammar that you choose speaks volumes of your educational background and will therefore provide you with a greater chance of landing a job.

Skills and Personal Qualities:

Focus on personal service

Hard worker

Punctual and dependable

Strong ethical background

Critical and quick thinking

Ability to learn and move quickly

Good personal hygiene

Ability to get along with others, especially other women

Is the field growing?

The dental field is always growing. At a growth rate of 22%, the field is growing much faster than average. As our society has become more educated on their oral healthcare, we have increasingly sought out professional dental care. Therefore, there is always a dental office looking for a trained dental assistant.

What is the pay like?

In our area, the pay is typically $9-14 starting out. There is always an opportunity to advance in the dental field and to receive a much higher pay. Many assistants go on to become dental hygienists, office managers, or in some cases, dentists.

If you are interested in learning more about dental assisting, please visit:

www.ada.org

Today’s guest post is from Dr. Maggie McKelvey, DMD. Maggie owns North Alabama Dental Assisting. She graduated summa cum laude from The University of Alabama with a degree in Biochemistry and Math. She cheered for the Crimson Tide during her time there and was a member of Alpha Chi Omega Sorority. She received her dental education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she graduated within the top of her class. Following graduation, she enhanced her dental experience working in private practice and pediatric clinics in Decatur and surrounding areas. Dr. McKelvey is a proud member of the American Dental Association, the Alabama Dental Association, and the Academy of General Dentistry. She is passionate about her profession and is so excited to help teach others about a career in the field of Dentistry!

August 5, 2014
Mollie’s List of Must Haves For Dorm Living

My roommate and I do not live in the same town so we decided to meet up and shop together. As soon as we started in Bed, Bath, and Beyond we became overwhelmed. We finally decided on the colors we both liked and then everything fell into place. I have always been excited about decorating my dorm room! I knew how I wanted to decorate it but I didn’t realize that I had to plan to get everything I would need for the next year! The bedding and decretive things were fun to find, but then I had to start thinking about how many lightbulbs I needed and how big does our trash can need to be. To make this whole process easier, I have come up with a list of must haves for your dorm room.

Dorm Must Haves: The Basics

Bedding

-Comforter

-2 Sets of XL twin sheets

-Mattress Topper (It is very important to get one that is thick and comfortable, this is what will make your dorm bed comfortable)

-Pillows

Bathroom

-Bathroom rug

-Trashcan

-Shower shelf

-Towels ( if you have not already recieved plenty from graduation gifts)

Other Dorm Items

-Area Rug

-Futon

-Stool (I plan on raising my bed to have more storage room)

-Storage Bins ( great for packing everything and storage!)

-Trashcan

-Laundry bag

Cleaning Supplies

-Detergent

-Clorox wipes

-Dryer sheets

-Hand soap

-Room spray

Dorm Must Haves: For Decorating

-String Lights!!

-String and paper clips to hang up pictures!

-Headboard

– This is the one my dad made for me!

I have less than a week until I leave for school and I almost everything planned out and packed. Earlier this week I even made a life size layout of where I wanted everything to go in the dorm room.

For more dorm decorating ideas, check out the Horizon Point Pinterest board!

July 31, 2014
3 Tips for Growing Your Career
Career growth and transition is an area that I’m not only interested in discussing, it’s something I’m personally invested in as well. I have had some great experiences, and many of the career growth opportunities at first seemed to be due to chance. As time goes on, I have become more strategic about seeking and selecting opportunities for growth and transition. Today we’ll look at both sides of the coin and some strategies you can implement to improve your own results.

Growing Your Career

My career started at the ripe old age of 12. I was working for my parents’ machine shop sweeping and doing other various cleanup duties. From there I progressively moved toward the kind of things I wanted to be doing. Here are three quick lessons I learned over time that you need to know:
1. You need to take charge of your own growth and development. It’s a part of being passionate about what you do. Don’t expect someone else to walk up to you and hand you something to learn right at the exact moment that you need it. Start building your knowledge early and anticipate future stresses on your limits (and plan accordingly). My advice? Push your own boundaries before someone else does it for you.
2. Find a pain point for others that you’re passionate about solving. It’s funny, because I have always felt like the best opportunities have come to me in areas that others didn’t particularly care for. Then I realized, that’s one of the keys to having work that you love: doing what you love, even when nobody else does. Find a need that you are passionate about filling, and you’ll never have a lack of work.
3. In the early years, don’t expect to love everything you’re doing. You are picking up valuable skills and experience, but one of the most important things you learn early in your career is what you do not want to do. You learn the kind of culture that fits you. You learn the kind of manager you work best with. And you learn what sort of things you really don’t care much for. There’s a bigger list of things you don’t want to do, so start crossing those off instead of purely seeking out what you want. Over time as you move between positions and companies, you will refine that list until it leads to the type of situation I describe in the section below.
Transitioning Careers

A few months back, I transitioned from working as an HR Manager for a defense contractor to a role as an HR Analyst with a consulting and research firm. For those not in HR, that’s a pretty wild shift. I went from “doing” HR every day (recruiting, employee relations, benefits, etc.) to writing, researching, and speaking about best practices in the industry.

Why the shift?

For a long time I have had a passion for writing and speaking; however, those activities always had to fit around my day job as a practitioner. When the opportunity came up to become an analyst at Brandon Hall Group, I knew this was the chance I had been looking for to see if those activities were what I wanted to do for the next phase of my career.

I’m sitting here thinking about what sort of tips and strategies I can share for the transition, but I keep coming back to the three key points above.
- I took charge of my own career without waiting for someone else to do it for me. You need to do the same.
- I’m doing what I love. This job offered more opportunities to do what I love, so I jumped at it.
- I am still doing things that I don’t enjoy as much, but the number of those is less than in my previous roles.
The whole discussion around career development is bigger than a single blog post, but I’m hoping these thoughts will help you as you move through your career. For most of us it’s not a career ladder–it’s more like a career web. You may move side to side, back, and forward, but when you take the time to look at it holistically, it’s an overall forward progression to doing what you love.

Ben Eubanks is an author, speaker, and HR pro from Huntsville, AL. During the day he works as an HR Analyst with Brandon Hall Group. During the evenings he writes at upstartHR, a blog about talent management, leadership, and business.
July 28, 2014
Passion + Productivity = Give Back

“Rarely are there ever great achievements without great expectations.”

A mid-sized manufacturing firm in a small Alabama community demonstrates the give back mindset through their passion and productivity. This focus has transformed an almost bankrupt company into a thriving and profitable business. Not only that, their passion and productivity prompts them to give back to the community in which they live and work.

The company’s mission statement reads, “We are passionate about resolutions that positively impact our customers.” With this mission, the President of the Company states, “We have products and solutions that can help make customers more productive, save money and keep people safe. Why would we not want everyone to know this? We can help enrich the lives of others by what we do. Because we believe this, we can approach our work with not just hard work by an element of intense emotion. This type of enthusiasm is contagious. The longer people work in this environment the more infected they become.”

Their work does not stop with “intense emotions”. It extends to a focus on productivity as well. “Productivity is a measurable activity. Every week we get together as a team and review a couple dozen key indicators to be certain that we are meeting our internal and external standards. The bottom line of how this is demonstrated is letting our yes be yes and our no be no. Our vision is to be the trusted source for tough mining and industrial rubber solutions. We will bend over backwards, increase productivity, to make certain we keep our promises to one another and to our customers,” states the company President.

The focus on passion and productivity extends beyond the walls of the organization and into the community.

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

The company seeks to spur more passion and productivity in the community by partnering with organizations, churches and schools that impact individuals.

Through the Partners in Education Program in their community, the company works with high school students to help them maximize their potential by providing college scholarships, hosting a parent night and providing one-on-one career coaching to students at the school. The combination of these programs helps the school with resources that are not readily available otherwise. The company hopes that these efforts will help students form a plan, create goals and reach their potential in order to become productive citizens.

July 24, 2014
Leaders are Noticers

“The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

According to my editorial calendar, I’m supposed to be writing about job shadowing today, but I’ve noticed something. In the past week I’ve had conversations with three people about their work. One just quit. One is DONE with her work and is planning her quit, and one just realized she wants to quit, but hasn’t started the plotting of her exodus yet. (By the time I see her again next week though, I imagine she will have it all mapped out.)

Why are these three DONE with they’ve been doing? Through these conversations, I’ve decided that the two reasons people quit a job (they are actually quitting a boss, not a job) is because:

They don’t feel like they have the opportunity to make a contribution and/or

They don’t feel like the contribution they are making is valued.

Long and short, what they are doing isn’t being noticed. And the one who needs to be noticing, their boss, just isn’t. More often than not, the boss is too busy “doing things” instead of noticing people and the contribution they are making or have the potential to make.

As the boss, don’t let it take cancer (read the book) or a resignation letter to make you wake up and notice. Want to be a leader or a “hero” as the quote states, then start noticing people- who they are, what they value, how they want to contribute- and give them the avenue to make a contribution that is valued. If you do, you become a hero in their eyes and you get to keep them as valuable talent. If you don’t, they will demand to be noticed with a resignation letter. And if it takes the resignation to get you to stand up and take notice, as the guy who just quit boss did by offering him at $15,000 raise, stock options and a VP title to stay, you’re already too late. Your employee is already done, mentally moved on to a place where they think someone may stand up and take notice of their talents without having to demand it.

But I must end here; my three month old is demanding to be noticed by her cries. No one said the noticing was easy, as I delay picking her up to write these last few sentences, continuing to pretend to unnotice. No one said leadership (or parenting) was easy either. There is so much to be noticed. But if you can be half a percent better at noticing than the rest of the population half a percent more of the time, you’ll be able to do what everyone is trying to do but hasn’t quite figured out yet how to do it- retain the best talent.

July 22, 2014