The healthcare industry, still recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, will be facing unprecedented levels of transformation in the coming years. To keep up with a rapidly changing world, the sector needs to deal with a huge challenge — a scarcity of talent.
Hiring and retaining talent has long remained an issue for the healthcare industry worldwide. If the current trends continue, the World Health Organization estimates that by 2030, there will be a shortage of 10 million jobs in healthcare.
“The health sector is currently not sufficiently attractive for talents and graduates,” explains Celine Carrera, Chair of the WorkInHealth Foundation and Director of Innovation & Transformation at EIT Health.
According to Forbes’ World’s Best Employers 2023 survey, the first pharmaceutical company that can be found in the list, Pfizer, only ranks at number 25.
“If Europe is to maintain a vibrant and viable healthcare sector that can lead to innovation, we must rise to the challenge of recruiting and educating the best talents,” adds Carrera.
A large scale issue
It’s not just healthcare. The worldwide job market is going through massive shifts. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 predicts that 69 million new jobs will be created by 2027, while 83 million will be eliminated.
An additional challenge for the healthcare industry is the speed at which new technologies are created, particularly when it comes to manufacturing pharmaceuticals.
According to a McKinsey study, the main disruptors are new product modalities (such as cell and gene therapy), digitalization and advanced analytics. Together, these disruptors have created an 80% skill mismatch in pharma manufacturing. However, executives only perceive 10% of the disruption that frontline employees experience.
In particular, artificial intelligence and automation technologies will have a big impact on the healthcare workforce. The study estimates that 50% of existing work activities in the pharmaceutical and medical manufacturing industry could be automated, which will lead to many jobs being eliminated — and many more to be created.
Altogether, more than 90,000 jobs in the industry are expected to disappear between 2020 and 2030, while up to 120,000 new jobs could be created.
Manisha Singh, CHRO Advisory and EU HR Consulting Leader at Wipro, has worked extensively with healthcare and life sciences clients to develop talent acquisition strategies. She believes that unless industry leaders work to define what roles will be required in the future, the sector is not going to be ready for this transition.
“One thing for sure is that the job market is dynamic, uncertain and volatile. Not just for us employers but also for us as employees. None of us knows what’s going to happen next,” says Singh.
“Since the scale of the problem is huge, it makes tremendous sense for all of us to come together and think about innovative ways of rescaling.”
Insufficient training programs
According to Singh, the European healthcare sector has reported a gap of 40% between the skills it needs and the skills it can find.
Employers need to provide training to bridge that gap; both to help employees improve their performance at their current position (upskilling) and to train them to take on a new position (reskilling). However, the sector is significantly lacking in its training efforts to this date.
When it comes to upskilling, digital skills are the most urgently needed in the healthcare industry. According to GE Healthcare’s Reimagining Better Health 2023 report, clinicians identified technology skills as the first critical skill they want to learn, and 45% of clinicians reported not receiving adequate training to use available medical technology to its full potential.
“The healthcare sector needs to impart some basic digital native skills to all its workforce and it’s lagging behind in that area,” says Singh.
Meanwhile, reskilling will be essential to keep up with the speed at which new skills and jobs are created, many of which didn’t even exist before. The Future of Jobs Report 2023 estimates that 22% of jobs in the healthcare sector are created and destroyed every 5 years — a figure that is expected to keep growing in coming years.
However, only a third of pharma companies surveyed by McKinsey have launched reskilling efforts, and those who did cover less than 10% of the workforce.
There is now a growing demand for flexible and customizable training programs that allow employees to get official credentials while working. These kinds of programs would make learning new skills accessible to a larger portion of the workforce.
Outdated recruitment strategies
Historically, the healthcare sector has focused on hiring talent that was already trained, with quite narrow requirements for career and education backgrounds. However, this approach is currently proving insufficient to find the amount of qualified talent that the sector needs.
Employers need to start rethinking their hiring strategy.
“Often, this starts with how entry-level jobs are positioned,” writes Rya Conrad-Bradshaw, VP, Corporate Markets, Workforce Skills at Cengage Group. “In today’s labor market, talent can easily find competitive salaries and benefits in other industries, so benchmarking salaries and benefits against entry-level roles across other industries, as well as marketing the benefits and future career path of healthcare roles, is important to be competitive.”
Traditionally, hiring managers have required candidates to have certain types of work experience or hold specific university degrees. However, with the right training and onboarding, workers coming from a much wider range of backgrounds can be strong candidates to fill an open position, says Conrad-Bradshaw.
In addition, universities have been slow to create training programs that satisfy the rapidly changing workplace demands. This means it’s now often up to employers in the healthcare industry to offer their own accredited training if they want to meet the rising demand for skilled workers.
“Training should focus on what the industry really needs on the field, and the training programs should be designed to ensure the skills match the expectations of the labor market,” says Singh.
Eliminating some of the traditional criteria to hire talent, such as university degrees, could open up the healthcare industry to a much larger talent pool. Together with providing flexible training and remote learning and work options, updating the industry’s approach to hiring will attract talent from other sectors and result in not just a larger but also a more diverse workforce.
“Diversity is not just a nice thing to have. It’s essential for business and society to thrive,” says Singh. “We are responsible for taking systemic action to ensure everyone has equal opportunity in this future of work.”
Taking action now to prepare the future workforce
It is more evident than ever that the healthcare industry needs to urgently take action in order to catch up with the demands of a rapidly changing job market.
“We need to massively upscale the workforce if we want to move to a person-centered, value-based model. This will be a major cultural shift for the sector,” says Claire Nassiet, Venture Lead at the WorkInHealth Foundation.
She goes on to say that cross-industry collaboration — including public and private partnerships and altogether involving all kinds of healthcare stakeholders — will be absolutely necessary to tackle the current talent shortage.
The European healthcare sector, in particular, still has additional work to do to catch up with other regions, such as the US. McKinsey has reported that European R&D and commercial talent is almost on par with the talent available in the US. However, biotech executives and investors believe that Europe still lacks talent with an entrepreneurial mindset.
“There is an urgent need for health systems to attract and retain skills and valuable talents, for example by developing flexible and exciting career paths and clear routes to healthcare leadership roles,” adds Nassiet.
Making healthcare a more attractive sector to work in should be a big focus of marketing efforts to grow the talent pool. This will involve communicating the value and the impact of the work carried out by healthcare professionals.
While the Covid-19 pandemic has driven rising costs and major shortages of qualified workers across the healthcare sector, stakeholders can also take advantage of the increased awareness it has brought to the importance of a thriving healthcare industry.
“We have momentum here,” says Nassiet. “The pandemic may have changed the way the public sees the health sector, and we should leverage this to increase its attractiveness.”
As outlined above, shifting the work culture to focus on lifelong learning will allow the existing talent to grow and adapt to the evolving requirements of the market. This cultural shift will also need to embrace more flexibility when it comes to empowering talent to move between sectors and gain new skills.
“We have a huge chance to open up the sector now,” concludes Nassiet. “We need to accept diverse sets of skills and profiles if we want the health sector in Europe to flourish.”