This page is for the person with a biology, public health, computer science, statistics, or engineering degree who keeps opening informatics postings and closing them again because the third bullet says "RN." Most of those postings are not for you, and the ones that are rarely say so plainly. Here is how to read them, which tracks fit which degree, and what to do in the months before you apply.
Every posting on this board is tagged from one or two sentences in its qualifications section, and you can learn to find them in thirty seconds. Look for the sentence that begins "Bachelor's degree in" or "Master's degree in." Whatever follows is the list of people the hiring manager imagined; if it names your field, or ends in "or a related field," you are in the room. "Or equivalent experience" means a certificate or associate's degree plus relevant work also qualifies, and employers who write that phrase usually mean it, because HR made them define it. The licensure sentence is separate: "RN preferred" or "clinical background a plus" is a tie-breaker, not a gate, whereas "current RN license required" is a gate, and no amount of informatics coursework substitutes for it. The board's green, amber, and red tags are exactly this distinction.
Entry-level informatics postings ask for zero to two years, and the two years are usually satisfied by things you did not think of as experience: a research assistantship where you cleaned data in REDCap, a thesis built on an EHR extract, a summer in a quality department, teaching a lab section that used SQL, or a part-time job in a clinic's front office that touched the scheduling system. Write those on the resume in the employer's vocabulary (data abstraction, chart review, registry maintenance, workflow analysis) rather than the university's. Mid-level postings that say "three years" are often filled by people with two, so apply when you are within a year of the number.
Biology and biomedical science graduates move most easily into clinical research informatics, laboratory informatics, terminology and standards (SNOMED CT, LOINC, and RxNorm are biology by another name), and the analyst roles at genomic testing laboratories. Public health and epidemiology graduates fit quality and population health analytics, public health informatics, and the biostatistics roles on this board whose degree lines do not require a statistics degree. Computer science and information systems graduates fit EHR application analyst and implementation roles, interoperability, healthcare cybersecurity, and clinical data science. Biomedical engineering graduates fit clinical data science, device and imaging informatics, and the clinical innovation teams at vendors. Statistics graduates fit everything quantitative, and health administration graduates fit revenue cycle analytics, data governance, and the project and product roles. The Career tracks page describes each track and links to its current listings.
Epic certifies employees of its customers and partners, so you cannot arrive certified. What you can do is apply to the postings tagged "Epic cert sponsored after hire," which pay for the training and expect you to pass within a few months of starting, and to Epic's own Technical Solutions Engineer and Project Manager roles, which take any bachelor's degree and train in Verona. A posting that says "Epic certification required" at hire is written for people who already work in an Epic shop; skip it until you are one of them.
A small number of credentials change how a resume reads, and most are inexpensive. CAHIMS from HIMSS has no experience requirement and tells a health system's recruiter that you know the vocabulary. The free OHDSI training in the OMOP common data model is the single most useful line for real-world data employers, and naming it is often worth more than a certificate. HL7's FHIR fundamentals course matters for interoperability roles. A SAS base certification helps for the biostatistics and clinical data management track, where SAS is still the production language. AMIA's Health Informatics Certification (AHIC) becomes available once you hold a health informatics master's or enough experience, and it is the credential most clearly aimed at non-physician informaticians. See the Credentials page for how each one answers the "are you clinical?" question.
Hiring managers in this field want to see that you have touched messy clinical data and survived. One project is enough: a cohort built in SQL on MIMIC or Synthea data with a short write-up, a REDCap project you designed for a student study, a Power BI or Tableau dashboard of a public quality dataset, or a small FHIR app that reads from a sandbox server. Put it on GitHub with a README that a non-programmer can follow, and link it from your resume. It will come up in every interview.
Start with the New grads view, which holds the entry-level roles open to a certificate, bachelor's, or master's, and the Internships view, which holds the fellowships and internships that are the usual first step: the APHL informatics fellowship, the CSTE applied epidemiology fellowship, CDC's Public Health Informatics Fellowship, and the vendor and health system internships that post each autumn. Set "Your degree" and "Your background" in the board's filters so the listings that name your degree rise to the top, and subscribe to the Monday email so you see new ones while they are still new.
If a posting names your degree but asks for one more year than you have, apply and say so in the cover letter in one sentence. If it asks for a clinical background you lack but lists the clinical part as preferred, apply and lead with the data skills. If it requires a license, do not apply; send it to a nurse you know and move on. The people reading this board have the same question you do, and the answer is almost never in the job title. It is in the degree line, and now you know where to look.