Free medical assistant training program launches in Sacramento this fall
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- JVS Bay Area will launch a free medical assistant program in Sacramento this fall.
- The program includes five months of training, paid internship and job coaching.
- JVS covers all student costs and boasts job placement rates as high as 80%.
Sacramento job seekers have the chance to enter a high-demand health care career without the hefty price tag.
JVS Bay Area, a nonprofit with a proven track record in workforce training, ia bringing its free medical assisting training program to the capital region. Applications are open through Sunday for the five-month certificate and paid internship program, which begins this fall.
Behind the tuition-free model is a finely tuned support system designed to remove the obstacles that too often derail people’s paths to career stability and advancement.
From personalized coaching to direct financial assistance, JVS ensures participants don’t just start the program — they complete it, find employment and realize their long-term dreams of success.
“I would say the secret sauce … is our participants have a JVS coach who is working with them, who is their point of contact, who they can check in with,’” said Kelcie Wong, the chief program officer at JVS. “(They’re) going to believe in them and advocate for them and keep them accountable, and be a person along the journey with them. We have heard over and over from participants, that’s what the difference maker is.”
These coaches provide individualized wraparound services. Some students may need help with transportation while others have to troubleshoot childcare issues.
These relationships aren’t an afterthought — they’re the backbone of JVS’s model. Coaches monitor academic progress and intervene early when students fall behind. They connect participants with cash assistance to cover basic needs. They prep students for interviews and help navigate job search rejection. The coach is there, Wong said, until the job offer is in hand and afterward.
The Sacramento program will accept between 20–25 students in its first cohort, which runs from September 2025 to January 2026. In the Bay Area, JVS regularly receives 300 applications for 20 spots in its medical assisting program.
So far, more than 185 applications have been submitted for the first cohort in the capital, Wong said, and JVS has been in conversation with potential employers at several federally qualified health centers.
Proven job training program coming to Sacramento area
Since launching its medical assisting training in 2016, JVS has trained more than 400 participants in the Bay Area, boasting job placement rates as high as 80%. The program combines 12-plus weeks of accelerated clinical instruction, 160 hours of paid internship and extensive job search support.
The medical assisting profession offers a stable, growth-oriented career path. In California, the average hourly wage for medical assistants ranges from $18.81 to $28.27, with job growth projected at 20% from 2020 to 2030. But while demand is high, training costs can be steep — as much as $40,000 for a certificate-level program.
JVS’s program is designed to remove that barrier. The organization spends $9,500-plus per participant, covering tuition, scrubs, textbooks, transportation, laptops if needed and internet access upgrades for hybrid classes. Yet for students, it’s entirely free.
Ksenia German had been laid off from a tech company when she found out about the JVS medical assisting program through an email from the California Economic Development Department.
If she would have had to pay, she said, she couldn’t have swung it. She was living off unemployment benefits and had just enough in her savings account to cover three months worth of rent.
The accelerated program would take five months to complete, German said, and she would be paid about $21 an hour for the 160-hour internship if she was accepted. Then 40, German had always been drawn to medicine because she wanted a career where she could help people, but she’d always been afraid of the science.
Medical assisting seemed approachable because she was helping the people involved in the science, she said, but it would allow her to test out her capacity to learn it.
“We learned physiology,” she said. “We learned like all this hands-on knowledge: how to move patients, how to draw blood, how to make injections, how to make vaccinations, how to make like all these diabetes tests, how to check blood pressure.”
Students frequently had to demonstrate their knowledge, German said, through weekly tests and, in daily classes, showing the instructor their skills.
“It was very intense,” she said. “In the beginning, I was very, very nervous. I wasn’t sure whether I could handle it and whether I would be good enough for it? But it worked out well.”
JVS allowed students to share placement preferences, German said, and she asked whether she could be placed in a neurology setting. She ended up in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion.
The experience was life-changing, she said, as over the course of her internship, she won the clinic staff’s confidence in her ability to work independently. After her internship, she got a call from the head of nursing at the clinic: Another JVS student was heading off to study nursing, and she was being offered the position.
JVS builds a ladder, as well as a launchpad
Wong has learned that success looks very different for each graduate. She recounted a profound memory of one woman in her 60s who recently completed the medical assisting program with a Central Valley cohort.
“She had started crying,” Wong said. “She told our staff member that it was the first graduation she’d ever been part of in her life. … I go to like 15 graduations a year, but I really felt how powerful that could be for somebody who’s older and has been working but has never been part of a graduation.”
Once students get their foot in the door, though, the sky is the limit, Wong said, and she has seen students go on to become nurses, practice managers, physician assistants and more.
Now that German feels a lot more comfortable with science, she is taking prerequisite classes to get into nursing school.
“I’ve been here in this clinic for almost one year,” said “It’s hands-on, real and incredibly rewarding. ... I get my paycheck every Wednesday. And I have stability working here in the field. It means a lot, especially when you are an immigrant and when you’re rebuilding your life.”
Health care executive Natalie Roesler of The Permanente Medical Group in San Francisco said that JVS coaches continue to support students long after they graduate, giving them the confidence and the encouragement to continue to grow in the industry.
“We’ve hired … mostly medical assistants or phlebotomists,” she said, “and I have seen medical assistants return to school, continue to develop themselves and become LVN’s or licensed vocational nurses. I’ve also worked closely with one of our JVS graduates from, I believe, our second cohort of medical assistants. He’s now a successful physician assistant in the medicine department.”
Roesler, who sits on the JVS board, said the majority of medical assistants that The Permanente Group or Kaiser Permanente have hired over the last 10 years have chosen to advance within that field.
“They can become what we call a senior medical assistant, or they can become a lead medical assistant,” Roesler said. “In our eyes, that’s still an advancement in the organization, where they may be leading a small team, or they may be seen as the leader on their team.”
About JVS Bay Area
Founded in the 1973, JVS has become a statewide leader in workforce training, operating programs across every major California metropolitan area. Over the past six years, the organization has placed more than 1,750 job seekers into high-quality careers, with an average post-program wage increase of 135%.
As JVS brings its flagship health care training to Sacramento, its mission remains the same: to build equitable pathways into good jobs for people historically shut out of opportunity. Applications for the Sacramento medical assisting program are open until Sunday at jvs.org/programs/medical-assistant-certificate-sacramento/.
This story was originally published June 18, 2025 at 10:05 AM.
