1. Skip to content

Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Health Care

They are talking about this topic: Workforce Trends & Challenges

 

Your Selection:


The quotes below are about this issue:
Retirement: Many nurses are approaching retirement age, but are delaying retirement. This makes it difficult for employers to strategically hire and train new employees in preparation for a wave of retirements. This, too, fuels concern about an increase in shortages of experienced workers.

Employer Quote Region
"One of the concerns that I have is the numbers look very good right now, but we know that things will change. The main thing that is being pushed right now is science and technology. So, as those kids graduate and go into college and find those fields—where does health care fall in that situation? We are going to have the people that are in health care right now that are getting ready to retire and there is going to be a freak-out because there will be a shortage of employees because now all of these kids are going into the engineering jobs and health care is being left behind." Southeast
"One of the things as far as workforce needs for the future, for the laboratory, we have our professional organizations looking at the retirement factor. They're predicting that there's going to be a real large spike in need across the nation. We're trying to gear up and prepare for that. A lot of people only look five years in advance. That's a seven to ten year thing that's going to explode. I'm assuming that is similar for nursing and many of these other categories. Many of the practitioners are older so that's the same thing for faculty. Faculty members are closer to sixty." Southeast
"One of our issues is that some of our older workers are wanting to ratchet back on their FTE, and so it becomes a little bit difficult to have more full-time positions open to recruit new ones. So, those are some of the internal challenges that we have. Because people don't want to retire as early as maybe they used to. They want to stay in the workforce longer, and so we're sort of struggling through some of those types of things.

And for the lab, while there are Minnesota programs, we actually run a clinical site, too, for the lab. But we get them out of North Dakota. They come through [MnSCU college] and so the collaboration that we have, they work through that. But we're getting them from other states as well. For us, it's really an issue. It's not about growing the number of positions. For us, it's more about replacement. When so many people think that there are lots of jobs out there, it's not because there are so many more positions that are being added in those fields—I think it's an issue of retirements or people moving or things like that. But it's not because we're trying to grow those specific categories and positions across our organization."		 Southeast
"If you took a survey today, probably the average age of a working nurse is 47- to 52-years-old. And that's both RNs and LPNs, I believe. A lot of times, in the nurse's aide population, people don't work that long because it's a physically demanding job and people often go back to school and go into something else after a particular age. There are some that work their entire career in that area though. But when you think about the number of nurses that are going to be retiring, that challenges us to think about doing things differently. Maybe some sort of a team model so that we can manage the number of people that we take care of, and help the new people learn what these new systems are. But replacing, if we think about today and ten years ago, replacing the number of people we have, then that's one story. But I can remember when I started as a nurse, I think the average age was maybe 30-something years old. Now, it's the late 40s. And that makes a big difference when you think about five or ten years down the road. How are we going to care for people? And how many people will we have to have to be able to fill that need?" Southeast
"When you look down the road it's not just what we're doing or what the long-term care facility is doing, but it's the new development coming into town or in the area. Concerns that are going to spread. Market saturation is a potential there. You know, spreading our workforce pretty thin. Potentially, down the road, it's a concern." Southeast