Employer Quotes

The quotes below are about this issue:
Future skills needed include the ability to work with geriatric populations with complex conditions and multiple diagnoses. Technological and IT skills, including patient care through telemedicine, will also be very important. Others mention leadership skills and more RNs in long-term care. For lab techs, they predict the need for more advanced training and molecular understanding.

Employer Quote	Region
"And there will be a growth in geriatric populations within our health care staff, too, so you have a twofold geriatric dimension."	Metro
"If I look at who I hire five years from now 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. 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."	Metro
"Some clinics are still paper-based, but there's a push towards the electronic medical record. And now, there's even a push that wherever you go, wherever you receive care as a patient, no matter what institution, that your medical record follows you, and that health care professionals have easy exchange of this health information. Some of us struggle with our hospitals and clinics to get us all connected. But I think that—and I would think this holds true for the nursing population as well—that having the IT savviness would be helpful. The people that are building interfaces may not understand the health care portion of it, and that leads to problems with the build. And IT services are very expensive, so you don't want to have to re-do them. But with the nurses coming out of school, and needing to use the EMR, and to chart everything electronically, I think that the new grads do it better than those of us that are used to using the paper. It is very complex. And, boy, if you are an RN and you also have the IT piece of it—or if you are a laboratorian and you know the IT piece of it—then you can really leverage that. And you will be able to leverage it even more in the future, I believe, than you can right now."	Metro
"In terms of the future of long-term care, I think that we're going to be seeing more hiring of RNs than LPNs with the complexities that are going be in our care facilities. The LPN skills aren't going to be applicable anymore—I mean, yes, for a certain piece of it, but we're going to be needing more RNs."	Metro