Hospital Administration: Taking the GMAT

The health care industry is full of all sorts of shot-administering physicians, scalpel-wielding surgeons, and a vast array of other positions that have direct contact with patients. But the health care industry is also just that -- an industry -- with a business side that must be upheld behind the scenes.

As you might imagine, the administrative jobs in health care can be tough, both to obtain and to handle, and hospital administrators are by no means an exception. Duties include planning, funding, directing, coordinating, managing and evaluating health care services. They also oversee most daily operations, ensuring that the relations between the staff and patients run smoothly, and coordinate the collaborative actions of governing boards, medical staff and heads of departments.

All these responsibilities, thankfully, do not go unrewarded: according to CBSalary.com, the average salary for a hospital administrator in the United States is $414,390. Even the salary at the 25^th percentile is quite lucrative, at $348,959, and the salary at the 75^th percentile is a healthy $549,634. As such, it should come as no surprise that the job of hospital administrator showed up on CNN Money's list of top-100 jobs, coming in at No. 36.

To become a hospital administrator, one must have a robust amount of experience in a hospital setting, along with an excellent educational background. A master's degree in health services administration is a must, and a degree in either public or business administration is often necessary as well. Still, given the high salary and attractiveness of the position, when a job in hospital administration opens up on the market, you can bet that a number of highly qualified candidates will be applying to the position. As a result, it can be tough to stand out from the crowd, but one potential way to do so is by taking the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT).

For those unfamiliar with the GMAT, it is a standardized test that is administered to measure one's aptitude to succeed academically in graduate business studies. According to the test's official site, the GMAT exam measures one's skill level in verbal, mathematical, and analytical writing subjects (and does not measure one's knowledge of business or any other subjective qualities).

While many people cringe at the idea of a single test determining entry into a desired position or school, the fact of the matter is that tests are a major factor at many levels; the ACT and SAT are important for college admissions, and most graduate schools look at test scores as well when evaluating candidates (e.g. the LSAT for law school and MCAT for medical school). The GMAT is no different, in that it gives evaluators an unbiased method of determining a candidate's value.

By no means is a GMAT score the only thing that a hospital's hiring team will look at when looking for a new hospital administrator, but there's no denying that, when all other factors are equal, a respectable GMAT score can help one candidate get an edge over another who either has not taken the GMAT, or who did take the GMAT but received a poor score.