WorkInHealth Foundation and Amazon Web Services announce their partnership

30th October 2024

The WorkInHealth Foundation and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have entered a Powerhouse Partnership to work together to tackle the Talent Gap in Healthcare. Based on AWS advanced solutions and WorkInHealth Foundation’s expertise and network, this partnership will help to close the gap in the health sector by upskilling and reskilling talent, particularly in skills that are all too often absent from profiles today: digital and AI.

For several months now, the healthcare sector has been under threat. The gap between the skills of current and future profiles and the demands of the sector is far too wide. While the industry is growing fast (55% of life sciences companies plan to hire this year), 80% of pharma-manufacturing companies are already facing a deep skills mismatch. The urgency is clear: without immediate change, the sustainability and growth potential of Europe’s healthcare industry is at risk. Yet only a third of companies have launched retraining efforts, with an average investment six times lower than in other high-tech sectors.

Faced with this situation, the WorkInHealth Foundation and AWS have decided to join forces to tackle the talent gap that threatens growth, competitiveness, and innovation in the healthcare sector.

This partnership is based on a common goal and shared values: helping people to live longer, healthier lives through digital innovation, which is crucial to transforming healthcare by providing better, faster, and broader services.

By partnering with the WorkInHealth Foundation, AWS aims to leverage from this partnership to train people in digital skills, accelerate progress in healthcare, and prepare individuals for careers in the sector, moving closer to its goal of training 29 million people by 2025.

EIT Health and the WorkInHealth Foundation are embedding their roadmaps into larger political agenda to offer a unique space for industries and companies like AWS to unite forces with other complementary corporates. As an ecosystem backed by the European Union, we give AWS a unique proactive stance in solving a major societal issue and provide it a neutral ground to be an actor of change. We empower and federate collective action at sector-level, thus supporting the health sector as a whole, which in turns obviously benefits individual organisations with a larger, more qualified, and fit-for-purpose talent pool entering the sector. We generate business intelligence and activate our network to support AWS shift towards digital health systems, with patient in a centre of transformation, and support them in this transformation and its consequences on jobs, talent pool and skills.

At the same time, AWS, as a knowledge partner and ambassador, brings us invaluable insights from the frontlines and help us funds major projects, such as:

First, AWS is committed to promoting women’s empowerment by taking part in several of our initiatives, such as:

The Agnès Guerraz Prize, awarded to one of the participants in the Women Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. AWS sponsored the winner and all participants with cloud credits, to help them bring their ideas into reality with their services.
The FutureHealthHERo campaign by highlighting their amazing digital Health HERoes
Cross-KIC initiatives like Girls Go Circular, that supports talented young women (14-19 years old) with team prizes, as they explore tech, innovation, and STEM in yearly challenges. Furthermore, prizes are invitation to dream big, experiment, and turn bold ideas into reality.

Also, AWS participates in our Career Fairs, including the next one in January 2025, which aim to connect talent with recruiters through one-to-one meetings.

We can also mention the i-Days, a European student competition that invites them to think of a solution to face a real-life healthcare problem, whose final will be held in Budapest in November 2024. During the event, AWS will be a network partner, offering prizes to all the winners from the 25 countries, as well as to the sponsor of the European final, where it will sit on the jury and award prizes to the three best ideas.

Finally, WorkInHealth foundation and AWS are both sponsoring the Deep Tech Talent Initiative programme, created with the ambition of training more than one million people in digital skills by 2025.

With this upskilling objective, AWS has launched its Educate Platform for acquiring cloud and other digital skills for free!

This synergistic partnership raises awareness of transformative strategies, which can be seamlessly integrated into learning experiences, fireside chats, insightful reports, and more.

Watch a short video here to learn more about this partnership.

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About WorkInHealth Foundation

Created by EIT Health, the WorkInHealth Foundation addresses the evident and growing skills and talent gaps within the healthcare industry across Europe. The talent shortage threatens the sustainability and growth potential of the healthcare industry. Therefore, addressing it is of key strategic importance. The WorkInHealth Foundation works across four main activity areas: anticipation (using business intelligence to get ahead of skill needs), attraction (transforming the health industry with new talent, EU-wide), training (futureproofing through tailored upskilling and reskilling programmes), matching (leveraging AI platforms and services to align talent with employers). Through the Skills Observatory, the WorkInHealth Foundation identifies emerging skill shortages and guides tailored education programmes, ensuring a capable and adaptable health workforce.
For more information: www.workinhealth-foundation.org
Follow us on our LinkedIn: WorkInHealth Foundation ; and on X: @WorkInHealthFdn.

About EIT Health

EIT Health is one of the ‘Knowledge and Innovation Communities’, or KICs, on the theme of health and active ageing, launched and funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), an EU body, since 1 January 2015. EIT Health is a Horizon 2020 instrument. EIT Health aims to boost innovation by integrating the three aspects of the knowledge triangle (Innovation; Education; Business), to develop solutions to emerging societal challenges, to develop products and services that meet consumer needs and, more generally, to play a pioneering role in strengthening the competitiveness of European industry, improving the quality of life of Europeans and ensuring the sustainability of healthcare systems in the face of the growing burden of the cost of chronic diseases linked to ageing. EIT Health is made up of 7 geographical nodes spread across Europe, bringing together more than 130 partners from industry, academia, and clusters in the MedTech, BioTech and DigiTech fields.
For more information: www.eithealth.eu
Follow us on our LinkedIn: EIT Health France ; and on X: @EIThealth_FR.

About Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Launched in 2006, AWS delivers business-critical infrastructure services in the form of web services, now known as cloud computing. It provides an ultra-reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in a cloud that hundreds of thousands of businesses in more than 190 countries around the world have already adopted. With data centres in the US, Europe, Singapore and Japan, this cost-effective, resilient, open, flexible, and secure platform works for customers in all sectors.
For more information: www.aws.amazon.com