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Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Health Care
They are talking about this topic: Workforce Trends & Challenges
The quotes below are about this issue:
General Workforce Shortage: Many employers are having difficulty filling positions, particularly for LPNs, advanced practice and specialty, and clinical lab careers.
| "I think it's getting better. True partnerships with the employers and the school. I think—in the laboratory—we've seen a great deal of success. But I think that there's still work to be done. I think that the laboratory—just in looking at the titles up there—I had to smile. I'm sure to somebody outside the lab, you look and think, 'Gosh, these people are all complex in the laboratory!' People don't understand what we do, and because of that, the majority of the applicants we get—I'll get 50 applicants per job posting—and two or three applicants will actually qualify for the position. But I'll get every biology degree and chemistry degree out there, and they don't qualify." | Metro |
| "I still see a demand in the lab that I can't meet. We had a full-time position, and we actually had someone from another hospital in northern Minnesota call us and say, 'Hey, I have this person that—due to staffing—we have to let go.' And we had a position that was open, and he was the only qualified person that I interviewed. We hired him, and thankfully his life was such that he was able to relocate. But, yeah, I have maybe a handful of people apply for open positions, whether it's in the hospital or the clinic." | Metro |
| "We have had plenty of new grads apply, so no issues there right now. But some of the specialty positions—or the experienced RNs in certain areas—we've had a hard time finding those." | Metro |
| "For lab, I have both the MLT and the two-year and the four-year. We probably get five applicants that we would even consider at all, and then, we're down to maybe two that even come close, and they're all brand new, right out of school. It takes us up to nine months to train them on the job, so our problem is finding even good ones that we can train." | Metro |
| "Many who have the bachelor's degree are retiring, so trying to get replacements for that kind of experience and, like they were saying, some of the specialty areas are difficult to fill. We've got a problem." | Metro |
| "I'm not really finding LPNs, and I've got locations in southern Minnesota. I attend all the college fairs. I go to the classroom. I do mock interviews. I do whatever I can to get my face in front of them, and then they tell me they want to continue on to be an RN." | Metro |
| "They're not going to sit for the boards or whatever, so in skilled nursing and long-term care, we need the LPNs, and I'm not finding grads. Our St. Paul location's doing okay, but..." | Metro |
| "If I look at who I hire five years from now, you know, for lab testing, it's molecular, it's DNA-based, it's RNA-based. It's all of those things we learned—that I learned—as a cytotechnologist. I'm not a clinical lab scientist. The data speaks a lot to the clinical lab science portion, but there's a two-year degree, folks, called cytotechs that are extremely misaligned. We don't have enough of them, and they are a right-hand assistant to the pathologist, which is a physician leader in the lab. So, we need good folks that can sit and do that work even while their work is becoming more complicated in terms of a molecular-based level. We used to be good at diagnosing things 90 percent of the time. Now, we have to be 99 percent sure when we put that diagnosis out the door that it's good. And that only happens by a trained person. So, I look at hiring—and it's also looking at the cytotechnology workforce—and asking, 'What else can we teach those folks to do?' Because they have a certain sub-skill set that's different than a clinical lab scientist and that's different than a clinical lab tech. And there is discussion about, in the future, making that more of an advanced practice provider level, so they can do more independent judgment. Because our line stops because we're not licensed to have an independent judgment, but we doing an underlay of independent judgment." | Metro |