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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:
Lab Tech: Laboratory employers are seeing similar workforce needs for technologists as nursing professions. Among the various comments, many say that technologists are playing a more prominent role in the health care team, requiring stronger soft skills. Some employers experienced a shortage of technologists while others did not.

Employer Quote Region
"In our lab, I've had retirees of 40 years of service. About six employees have retired in the last few years, and it was a little bit difficult replacing them, but now we're seeing a few more MLTs and lab techs come out.

Question: So, you think that it's pretty well-balanced?

Employer: Yeah. We have a great MLT program. We take two students, and we train them like they're going to become our employees. And so we also have a pool to pick from. We're fortunate in that respect. I get calls from recruiters all the time and I'm like, 'No, we're fine. We don't need anybody. We have students.' We're really fortunate."
Northeast
"Trying to recruit them to a very small hospital, in a very small town, it's difficult because it's not very glamorous. It's pretty basic work. I think that's where it takes a little more finesse. And I think creating those kinds of relationships ahead of time, or maybe getting some of your own people to go back to school and paying for that, or whatever you might need to do. Because, if you want to have a balance of medical technologists and medical lab technicians, MLT versus the four-year, that can be a little bit hard to maintain." Northeast
"Question: So, what you're saying is that the balance between the supply and the demand for lab positions—while it might be one thing in Duluth, that it's going to be something else in a small town?

Employer: Right."
Northeast
"Employer 1: There is a program at [out of state university] where you can assist MLTs further their education to that four-year degree. Online.

Question: And you're paying for that, and then for your people?

Employer 1: No.

Employer 2: Oh, no. They just self-initiated that.

Employer 2: Yes."
Northeast
"Clinical rotations used to be about 52 weeks long, and that was because everything was done manually. As automation has come, true rotations are now between 16 and 20 weeks. So, it's cut by more than a half. And when we train, we just provide a student—like we're going to teach you everything we learned in 30 years of our work...but it's just giving them the experience of being in a lab, being around the instrumentation, and so forth.

Question: If you were advising folks in training your applicants, would you tell them to go back to the 52 weeks?

Employer: No. Well, instrumentation is so different in every lab, but you can get a general feeling for troubleshooting an instrument. We're talking about quality control. Some of those things are always going to remain the same, but when you go to, say, the university, or to the hospital, they'll have more technology that you have to learn there."
Northeast
"I'm a laboratorian, so I feel like I need to make a comment about the laboratory. First of all, I think people who went into the laboratory, at least in my day and age, we went in because we didn't feel that we had very good communication skills. We didn't want to work with patients or talk to too many patients. That's why we went into the laboratory. But, that's not true anymore. We have to serve our communities. We have to be able to interrelate effectively with our colleagues. But I see that it's something that a lot of students that come into my program need to work on.

I also expected to hear that the way we trained them before needs to change because the equipment is so highly instrumented and automated now. And those pieces of equipment are—there isn't much we can do to fix them anymore—but we need to know when they're not working. We call service and they send service contractors that will either walk us through it or they will come down and fix it for us.

I was also thinking about how do we organize our work? How do we look at our work? How does that work flow? How can we address people and organize our work better, but yet not make mistakes?

And, again, communication skills are important because we're doing more with care and we're doing more things outside the laboratory. So, communication seems like it's going to be a bigger deal for us."
Northeast