Externships to Start your Career: Pharmacy Technician Training

Externships are increasingly becoming a new and accepted practice in vocational training. An externship is a training opportunity that focuses on hands-on experience or on-the-job shadowing and are offered by career schools, vocational centers or places where short programs of study and apprenticeship are given. 

Today CVS and Walgreens together have 26,187 jobs available on Simply Hired

If you are a vocational training student and are looking for an opportunity to launch yourself in your career of choice, start thinking of an externship as an integral part of your course. Having real-life work experience on your resume before you are done with your official training will greatly increase your chances of being hired once the course is completed. Ask your vocational training college or institute if it offers externships. Here are some questions you can ask about externships:

1. Which companies can you expect to work with in an externship?

2. What responsibilities will you have and what can you expect to learn?

Externships are generally flexible and so can be easily completed. If you are studying in an online program, they can be completed simultaneously, which can shorten the time between course completion and landing a job (if the company you are externing with agrees for you to extern concurrently with the course). 

The best part about an externship is that if you are passionate about your chosen field of work and are a dedicated hard worker, you have a good chance of landing a job once you're done with the course. It could also get your foot in through the door for a more meaningful internship at a bigger office with bigger responsibilities.

Externships open the door to opportunities that are closed to the bookish student. By working in your chosen profession, you immediately gain a network of professionals in the industry that can provide references as you look for work elsewhere. Your new colleagues might also recommend to a supervisor that you be hired as an employee. Employers like externships because they make hiring decisions easier by allowing them to observe prospective new employees on the job.

The Career Step school of online vocational training online is one school that offers externships to all its students and graduates of the pharmacy technician training program. Through a special partnership with pharmacy giants CVS and Walgreens, Career Step course instructors help students find externships at nearby locations. The course prepares students for a national certification, which increases their hiring and overall earning potential.

By externing with such large pharmacy chains, students are exposed to a wide network of pharmacists and other pharmacy technicians who can help them access additional job resources. The combination of vocational training and an externship is a great opportunity for anyone interested in becoming prepared for a world full of possibilities within the pharmacy world.

According to Simply Hired's Salary Estimator average salaries for pharmacy technicians is $32,000

Nancy is a 36-year old SAHM of two. She worked as a pharmacy technician in a community pharmacy for seven years before taking a break to be with her children. Her experience as pharmacy technician gave her valuable insights into the pharmacy industry, which she likes to share with others through her writing. Being an SAHM, Nancy is a huge proponent of vocational training programs that provide women like her the power to be their own boss.