Different Career Paths With an Emergency Management Degree
Are you calm and collected under pressure? Do you enjoy implementing procedures and creating policy? Are you a natural leader? Are you passionate about safety? If so, a degree in emergency management might land you the job of your dreams. With an education in this field, you can actually move on to work in a number of different industries, performing any number of tasks, so after graduating with this type of degree, you might be confused as to which path is right for you. Let’s take a look at some of the options you have in emergency management.
Emergency Management Tasks
No matter what job you choose, emergency management workers complete four basic tasks:
- Reducing Risk/Disaster Prevention
- Resource Planning for Emergencies
- Responding to an Emergency
- Fixing the Problems Caused by an Emergency
In other words, you’ll work hard to keep emergencies from happening, but also prepare adequately in case one does, as well as respond and clean-up if the worst case scenario happens. These four principles can be applied to just about any industry. For example, in the field of healthcare, you might work to reduce the risk of a disease outbreak, plan what will happen if an outbreak happens, quarantine areas to stop a disease from spreading, and work to help patients and make an area safe for others. Or instead, if you work for a business, you could prevent income loss, help financially plan for slow periods, respond to a product that isn’t selling well, and get the business’ income on an upward trend again.
Emergency Management Industries
Healthcare and business are just two of the industries where emergency management students can be hired after earning their degree. Others include:
- Counterterrorism and Homeland Security
- Natural Disaster Relief
- Government
- Civil Crisis Management
In fact, you can actually consider education in another area as well in order to better maximize your skills an interests. If you currently have a bachelor’s degree in one area, like political science, for example, you could get a second bachelor’s degree or master’s degree in emergency management to work in government. Or if you’re a nurse, you could get an additional degree in emergency management to work in a public health or natural disaster response. The possibilities are endless.
