In today’s rapidly changing world, the biggest challenge the healthcare sector faces is a shortage of talent. According to a 2023 survey by the business services firm PwC, 82% of health industry executives rank talent acquisition and retention as the biggest risk to companies in the healthcare sector.
To meet the rising demand for skilled workers, the healthcare industry needs to attract young talent. However, this sector is known for being slower in adapting to change when compared to other sectors.
This can lead employers to miss out on a large portion of the talent pool.
One of the main challenges when it comes to attracting young talent is that there is often a mismatch between the expectations of employers and employees — a mismatch that is driven by a job market in constant flux. For example, young recruits are increasingly expecting job benefits such as remote work options, flexible working hours and a company culture that prioritises work-life balance.
So what can the industry do to match the expectations of young talent and make itself attractive to prospective recruits?
To find the answers, it is crucial to listen to what the next generation of healthcare workers have to say.
Embracing diversity
As the healthcare industry evolves, so do the jobs. However, recruiters in healthcare are typically used to looking for talent with a very specific background and career path.
Fortunately, this is starting to change.
“It’s no longer difficult to justify how an engineer or a data scientist can help a doctor or a healthcare organisation,” says Sara A. Pedraz, who has a PhD in communication, gender and medicine. She now works with healthcare and pharma organisations to implement digital transformation and business innovation strategies.
Pedraz points out that the industry still has work to do in order to welcome a wider variety of educational backgrounds and career profiles, such as artists, philosophers or communication specialists, especially in innovation departments.
This challenge goes further than just looking for candidates with a broader array of skills. Pedraz says that the industry still needs to improve its ability to utilise the skills of these diversified profiles to ultimately deliver a positive impact to patients.
Recruiters need to understand that the path to a healthcare position is not linear. Diversifying your talent acquisition pool is not only a strategy to meet talent needs, but also benefits organisations that might have previously been missing out on great additions to their team.
Investing in communication
A common mistake of healthcare organisations is focusing their communication efforts strictly within their sector.
“Sometimes we are looking a lot at ourselves and only communicate to our peers because we have a common language and standard practices,” explains Pedraz. “We need to eliminate that barrier and start integrating new means of communication to be more appealing to people that are willing to collaborate with us.”
She believes that companies need to improve their ability to communicate what they do to people without a medical or technical background, and to clearly explain what real-world needs drive their mission.
The data supports that communicating your mission upfront can make a huge difference when reaching out to prospective employees. According to BioCentury’s Talent Survey 2022, the number one motivation for first-time job seekers to join the biopharma industry is the mission to treat and prevent disease. A favourable work-life balance and monetary compensation are ranked second and third, respectively.
Jean-Baptiste Michel, Business Development Manager for healthcare procurement firm Medikabazaar, decided he wanted to work in healthcare after taking part in a training program for a medical technology company.
He explains that, as a business student without a scientific background, it was not obvious to him that he could have an impact within the healthcare industry.
During his time at university, Michel launched a podcast about entrepreneurship in healthcare called Entreprendre dans la santé. Having interviewed over 80 healthcare entrepreneurs for the podcast, he observed that the organisations that managed to successfully attract and retain talent are those who share a clear vision and are vocal about how many opportunities there are in healthcare for people of all backgrounds.
“We need to share concrete stories from people without a medical background who work in healthcare, and share how much they are benefiting the sector,” Michel says.
He believes spending time in the field, directly in contact with patients and healthcare professionals, can make people understand how these jobs can have a direct impact on people’s lives.
“I think this is a value that you cannot find in other industries, and that’s what made me want to pursue a career in healthcare.”
Rethinking education
A big challenge for the healthcare sector is that the education available to medical professionals is currently insufficient.
“What we’re seeing currently in medical education is what we can describe as a lack of education about soft skills like communication and leadership,” says Nick Xifaras, former President of the European Medical Students’ Association (EMSA).
A survey by the EMSA revealed that this is one of the biggest issues facing medical education right now, he adds. “It was shocking to see how few medical students think they are adequately provided with the skills and experience to deal with health leadership and to communicate with the system that employs them.”
“This is something that is desperately needed in medical school, and something that we have been raising our voice about, but it is a very difficult system to change,” he says.
Xifaras explains that there is often a gap between people who are good educators and people who are good doctors. He advocates for medical education to be led by trained instructors who can teach both hard and soft skills, and are capable of guiding students in tailoring their academic curriculum to meet industry needs.
This last step is essential, especially given that there is currently a substantial disconnect between the education medical students receive and the realities of employment in the healthcare workforce. For example, in another EMSA survey, 53% of medical students reported that their digital health skills were ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.
“This is very concerning and something that definitely needs to be addressed,” adds Xifaras. “However, I don’t think that most medical schools in Europe have a good strategy in place to change this situation.”
As a response to the shortcomings of academic education, some students have been taking the reins of their own education by creating initiatives that provide mentorship, hands-on training and workshops designed to help prepare students to face the real world.
One example is Nucleate Bio, a non-profit founded by Harvard students in 2019 that now runs training programs across 20 locations in North America, Europe and Asia.
Michel believes there is currently an opportunity for healthcare organisations and educational institutions to come together and create learning programs that truly cater to the needs of the industry.
“Sometimes what we see at school is so far away from the realities of the field,” he says. “What I would like to see more in education is students going into the field. This would be very beneficial to understand what the problematics of the sector are.”
Adapting to the times
When taking action to make the healthcare industry more welcoming to young talent, one of the biggest challenges is that the sector has historically been slow to adapt to change.
This industry has been doing things the same way for years, sometimes even for decades, notes Pedraz. And while change is necessary, she believes young talent can sometimes be overly impatient and expect change to happen faster than is actually feasible.
In the healthcare sector, enacting change can typically take a couple of years longer than it would in other sectors, she says. “Things are moving forward slowly, so you need to be committed to becoming an agent of change.”
To facilitate this transformation, she believes the industry needs to flatten its hierarchy. This will give a voice to people from different backgrounds who seek to help the industry grow and evolve.
Ultimately, Pedraz, Michel and Xifaras all agree that the number one thing the healthcare industry needs to be doing is being more proactive in putting itself out there and sharing its mission with the world.
“We hear a lot about the tech industry, but we don’t hear enough about healthcare,” says Michel. “We need to make the impact of what we do understandable for everyone, not just to talent, but also to society as a whole.”