These are nervous times in laboratories. Staff shortages abound and the workforce is aging, but the recession acts as a defibrillator keeping the laboratory heartbeat humming as veterans postpone retirement. Acting to stem this shortfall and generate interest in science careers, the U.S. National Academies, to considerable fanfare, earlier rolled out a study calling for educational and policy reforms to ramp up the supply of domestic scientific and engineering talent, entitled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm.”
The storm has broken over America’s laboratories. Vexed by acute personnel shortages, medical labs have mobilized into a full-court press—lobbying and working policy levers to attract and retain talent, promoting their profession, and warning of the impact on quality care. Job vacancy rates exceed 50 percent in some states. New lab staffing models with less rigorous educational requirements are being floated.
“I think we have workforce challenges in front us that cannot be fully mitigated,” says consultant Paul L. Epner, citing demand from an aging population and a concomitant rise in testing that outstrips lab automation measures. Epner, who spent 31 years with Abbott Laboratories, helped create Abbott’s Labs Are Vital™ program to address the profession’s lack of public awareness, particularly the students it aspires to attract, most of whom are unaware that the profession is a career option.
Nearly 60 percent of the more than $4 trillion spent on global health care annually supports the clinical workforce, according to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, and ASCP, like other groups, is pulling out all the stops to raise the profession’s visibility. Labs Are Vital “was not just about selling the profession to non-laboratorians,” says Epner, “but also about boosting a grassroots effort of lab professionals toward their own profession to improve self-esteem.” ASCP, ASCOF, COMA, AACC and APHL all pitched, says Epner, hoping to earn favorable publicity on word of mouth to attract up-and-coming talent. According to a survey by the Coordinating Council for the Clinical Laboratory Workshop—a coalition of about a dozen lab associations— conversations with friends or relatives are far and away the leading mechanism that sparks interest in a lab career.
The demand for true talent always exceeds supply. In a 2007 HR Priorities Survey by ORC Worldwide, nearly two-thirds of respondents identified talent management as their most urgent strategic issue. They have not been disappointed. With waves of workers at retirement age in industrialized nations, and increased competition from developing nations, it’s a seller’s market. As the war for talent intensifies, so does the weight on lab managers tasked with stroking high potential stars.
Workers, goes the old adage, don’t quit bad jobs—they quit bad bosses. Nor do they necessarily follow the money. In the great global game to woo and win scientific talent, more employers—most notably medical labs— are extending noncash motivators as the proverbial carrot. Attracting and retaining talent without pay increases is STAFING“absolutely” a discussion people are having, says Kathy Doig, associate dean at Michigan State University and a national leader in medical lab workforce issues.
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