EMSA recruiter Christopher Stevens talks a little more about EMSA’s internal Paramedic school.
Can you tell us a little about your Paramedic program?
Unlike our EMSA Advantage in-house EMT School, our in-house Paramedic program is not available to the general public. So if you are an EMSA EMT and you want to become a Paramedic, you have to be an employee in good standing for a minimum of six months, which is our standard probationary period.
If you want to get into the program, you first send a letter of intent to the clinical department. They take your letter, they look at your employee file, and they put you through some student pre-placement testing. If you’re selected, you go through an interview and they select the class based on the interviews and test scores. If you’re admitted to the class you’re now an EMSA Paramedic Student.
We’re going to train you to be a fully licensed, nationally certified paramedic. So you continue working two days a week on the street as an EMT, and you go to school for three days a week. So there’s your five-day week, but we pay you as if you are continuing to work full-time as an EMT.
In about a year, you are a fully licensed paramedic with zero out-of-pocket costs and student loan debt. That whole time, we’ve paid your full-time wages, your insurance benefits, and we provided your uniforms, insurance books, tuition, clinical site fees and testing fees.
In return, you sign a three-year contract with EMSA once you’re finished. Now, obviously, we want you to stay around longer. We promote from within and we have a lot of opportunities for job growth. But at the very least, you have a guaranteed job as an EMSA Paramedic for three years.
It’s still a challenging program. School is still hard. Tests are still hard. You still have to put in a lot of effort on your part. But we accommodate your schedule, so you don’t have to work full-time and go to school full-time, and we pay for everything. And that makes it a lot easier for our EMTs to become paramedics, if they so desire.
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