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Capture Billing & Consulting, Inc., a medical billing company located in South Riding, Virginia, has partnered with the Loudoun Campus of Northern Virginia Community College NOVA to provide Medical Billing instructors for it’s Workforce and Development program. The program, which will benefit Virginia job seekers, offers students a Certificate in Medical Billing. Classes include medical terminology, medical office workflow, medical insurance billing and computerized billing.

People of diverse backgrounds and educational levels take these classes to receive job training and gain employment in the medical billing field. Many of the students have been downsized, are reentering the workforce or want to advance their careers. Students learn skills for handling difficult patient situations, medical law and ethics, general office procedures, medical billing, CPT and ICD-9 coding, claim submission, insurance follow-up and use of medical billing software. Proper handling of patient medical records and proper documentation use to ensure privacy issues and liability are also covered.

With the slow economy, class enrollment has doubled. “Traditionally the healthcare industry has been a very stable place of employment,” states Manny Oliverez, Director of Operations at Capture Billing and an instructor at the college. “People want secure jobs and with the job training we offer students are better prepared to enter into a new career.”

Katie Jennings is the Medical Billing Coordinator for Continuing Education at NOVA’s Loudoun Campus. According to Jennings, “We are glad to have instructors from Capture Billing. Their expertise in the Medical Billing field adds great credibility to our program. Thousands of students have already been helped with the classes we offer.”

Capture Billing also works closely with other colleges, providing internship opportunities for students to get real world work experience. And the training does not stop there. The company offers continuous training for its own staff of medical billers. Capture encourages and pays for its employees to obtain advanced CPC certification from The American Academy of Professional Coders.

If you’re a recent or soon-to-be college graduate, you may be wondering what industries are offering the most entry level jobs.

Despite the current economic slowdown, there are still entry level jobs to be filled in most career fields. However, some industries will be able to offer more jobs and better salaries than others, according to an article by CNN. Some of the most popular college majors are feeding those industries that need the most jobs. Following are a list of the most popular college majors.

• Biology. Biology majors are usually able to use their degrees in many disciplines, including genetics, medical research and ecology. Many biology majors also combine their degrees with other degrees, and a biology major may be a stepping stone to medical school or earning another advanced degree. To get a job in microbiology, biotechnology, healthcare or research and product development, a graduate degree is usually required. A general biologist makes $38,896 per year, while a biochemist earns $43,961 per year.

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Local school districts in Northwest Indiana are moving toward more extensive criminal background checks for potential teachers.

The Indiana State Police database conducts limited background checks for free, but several districts have implemented a policy that uses a nationwide criminal background service, which has the ability to check credit history, sex offender registries, and correctional systems.

However, many officials do not believe that credit reports are a factor in considering employment of teachers, but are important in considering school treasurers and fiscal managers.

A Merrillville School District official said the more in-depth search was necessary because there were individuals with records who were not in the Indiana report, making a nationwide investigation an important necessity in protecting its students.

Also, applicants from outside the state of Indiana apply for these jobs, making nationwide searching essential.

Substitute teachers can sign up to work in several Northern Indiana districts, but because the districts communicate with each other, only one background check is necessary.

Robert McDermott, co-chair of the Lake County Safe School Commission, said legislation was proposed in the Indiana General Assembly last session to make extensive checks for employment in Indiana schools a requirement but it didn’t pass. In conversations with local legislators, the possibility of reintroducing the legislation could be brought up again in 2009.

Like in many states, jobs in Florida have been increasingly hard to come by for the last year. Still many are taking it as a good sign that the state’s unemployment rate didn’t climb higher in September. For the last two month 6.6 percent of Florida residents have been without work.

This percentage translates to approximately 613,000 employable people who can not find jobs in Florida. This is the highest unemployment rate the state has had in 14 years, according to the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation.

The current Floridian unemployment rate is 2.4 percentage points higher than it was a year ago and .5 percent higher than the national average.

“I’m surprised it stayed steady,” Bruce Nissen told a reporter from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Nissen, who is an economist at Florida International Unviersity, went on to say that residents shouldn’t get overconfident. He expects the unemployment rate to resume rising before this year is finished.

According to University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith, unemployment statistics are a lagging economic indicator.

“We haven’t seen the worse…We can expect many more jobs lost as the U.S. economy slips into recession,” said Snaith.

Over the course of the last 12 months, 115,500 jobs in Florida have been lost, excluding those in the agricultural sector. Out of these positions, 75,200 positions were in the construction industry, which has been hit hard by the slump in the housing market and the rising foreclosure rate.

Other sectors that have lost a large number of jobs in Florida include manufacturing, retail, professional and business services, financial activities and administration and waste services.

The struggling job market has been particularly difficult on individuals with a long history of work who have only been employed in one industry. Since these people only know how to do one type of work, their options are particularly slim when their industry of choice begins to suffer.

Finding a job in Atlanta just got harder. According to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Georgia is now the 2^nd worst in the nation as far as job losses go. Since February employers in the state have done away with 93,000 jobs.

Despite this, figures from the Georgia Department of Labor show that finding an Atlanta job isn’t necessarily difficult all around. Certain industries in the city have taken a much harder hit, while others continue to add new jobs despite economic problems.

The construction industry seems to have taken the hardest hit, losing the most jobs in Atlanta. Over the last year, more than 11,000 positions in this industry have been cut by local employers. The housing market slump has been particularly difficult on this area of employment. With fewer people and companies purchasing property, there is now less need to start more construction projects.

Manufacturing jobs in Atlanta are also getting scarce. Within the last 12 months 8,000 positions in this industry have been lost. Between outsourcing and a decreased need in consumer spending, manufactures are having to cut jobs in order to keep profits up. Positions for specialty trade contractors also lost 8,000 positions.

Other industries that have lost a significant number of jobs include administrative and support, which lost 7,300, and local government, which cut 5,000 positions.

According to the state’s Department of Labor the best industry for Atlanta jobs is now Healthcare. Over the last 12 months, 6,700 local positions have been added in this sector. Between the fact that the population is growing and getting older, healthcare jobs remain in high demand.

Private school employers also added a significant number of Atlanta jobs. Over the course of the last year local non-government funded schools added 2,100 new jobs.

Other areas of employment that have increased over the last year include positions for social assistance jobs, which have risen by 1,300, and jobs with the federal government, where 1,300 positions were added.

When it gets harder to find a new job, competition for existing positions gets stronger. Employers often find themselves swamped with resumes, despite only have a limited number of openings to fill. This is what happened recently in Providence, Rhode Island when one hotel announced 50 something new jobs.

The downtown Providence Hampton Inn & Suites, which is expected to open in December, received approximately 5,000 applications for 50 to 55 new jobs. With unemployment in the state reaching 8.8 percent last month, many drastically need work.

These new jobs will pay anywhere from $9 to $15 an hour. If the state’s economy was better, positions such as the ones with this hotel would not draw as much attention. In order to be able to pay their bills, many will take whatever work they can get, which means that Rhode Island probably has a huge portion of its population that would qualify as underemployed. Out of the 5,000 people who applied, the Hampton Inn & Suites interviewed around 1,200.

According to Michael Buddenmeyer, the regional director of hotel operations for Fall River’s First Bristol Corp., 45 of the new jobs will be full-time positions. The other 5 to 10 will be part-time jobs. All will offer what is considered to be mid-level pay for positions in hotel operations in Rhode Island.

Buddenmeyer said that, given the state of the economy, he had expected to receive a large number of resumes, but had no idea he would be sifting through 5,000 applications. In order to make to be able to even manage such a huge number of applicants, he said that he started by eliminating everyone that did not have previous experience working in a hotel.

Instead of hiring the exact number of people he needed, Buddenmeyer said that he selected a few extra individuals to make up for those that would decide to quit sometime during the several month long training sessions. For example, he hired 16 individuals to work the front desk, even though he only expects to need somewhere around 12. Already, he says, the number of workers training for the front desk positions has dropped to 14.

More manufacturing jobs in Ohio are being lost.

The state has seen its industrial employment drop 2.7 percent during the last year, according to the Ohio Manufacturer’s Directory. Ohio lost 27,398 industrial jobs from August 2007 to August 2008.

An article by Manufacturers News states Ohio is home to 19,454 manufacturers that employ 997,952 workers, making the state the third in the country for industrial jobs. The loss of industrial jobs in Ohio is not alone, as Michigan has lost 5 percent of its jobs, Indiana has lost 2.2 percent, West Virginia has lost 1.3 percent and Pennsylvania has lost 1.2 percent.

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