Taking an official cna certification course is an important step towards becoming a certified nursing assistant. You have to take the course first before you can take the exam, CNA Certification Examination, and it will teach you all the skills and know-how you need for your future career.
When looking for a course, you should try and find the best you can. There are a lot of great ones out there, and all of the official courses you find will properly prepare you for the exam. One of your best options is to take a certification course with the Red Cross. They have a long and important history in health care, and many students feel that they have the best nursing courses around. Just about every student who takes a red cross course feels totally prepared for their exam. There are a lot of courses to consider, but you can save yourself the trouble of looking around for too long by just selecting a Red Cross offering.
When you sit down to take the CNA course, you’ll find that it’s made up of two different sections. If you want to be able to pass the test and become a practicing nursing assistant, you need to be ready for both halves of the test. One is a written section, the second is a skills test. You’ll be taking the written section first. This part is composed of multiple choice questions that relate to everything you learned in your CNA studies.
You need to answer about 100 individual questions for the multiple choice half of the exam. While it varies from person to person, on average it takes people no more than 2 hours to complete their questions. It can take some people a lot longer though, and you have to be prepared to wait, as you can’t leave the examination room and move on to the next half of the test until everyone who is taking the test with you has completed their questions. Once everyone is done and ready to move on, you’ll all go and take your skills tests.
In the second half of the cna certification exam, you’ll be tested on your skills. This all occurs much differently than the multiple-choice part of the exam. While everyone took their written test together, only a single student is tested for their skills at a time. You are going to learn a wide variety of skills in you CNA courses, and you’re going to need to be able to perform any of them if the evaluator asks you to. You’ll need another person there for your skills test, as you’ll need to perform your skills on a live human. This can either be a person that you bring, or it can be a patient if you take your examination in a medical environment.
Most skills tests involve demonstrating a number of different skills you learned in your course. Most of the time you’ll be asked to demonstrate about 5 different skills. Your course will have taught you far more than 5 different skills, but you won’t know which 5 skills you’ll be called upon to demonstrate, so it’s important that you know all of them.
By Rita Hayward
