Career Pathways for Young Care Staff in US Healthcare Organizations
How well do you know the younger generation within your organization?
- What are their goals?
- What are their career aspirations?
- What hidden skills do they have?
As a US-based healthcare organization, it’s important to recognize that younger care staff are not only the future of the healthcare system, but the future of your individual hospital, too.
Of course, like most hospitals across the US, you no doubt want to encourage this younger healthcare employee generation to take on the best career opportunities available to help keep them satisfied as part of your workforce.
The problem, however, is that you’ve got zero transparency over what their career aspirations look like, so it’s difficult to provide them with the opportunities they desire.
This, of course, can lead to high rates of attrition and an overall lack of employee satisfaction.
So, how can you gain a better understanding of what your younger care staff want?
Let’s start by considering the current situation
Picture a young unqualified care worker within your organization – we’ll call her Sarah.
Born in 1998, Sarah has grown up surrounded by technology. She knows that she has the digital world at her fingertips.
As a result, while she’s only young, she has big ambitions for her career. She knows what she wants, and she’s not afraid to go after it.
The problem?
She has no idea who to turn to or how to make her career aspirations known within your organization. She enjoys working at your hospital, but she’s now struggling to see the career path forward.
What’s more, other opportunities are starting to present themselves at other healthcare organizations – ones that she knows she is ready for.
At the same time, your organization has no idea that any of this is taking place in Sarah’s mind, because you’ve got no means of knowing without physically sitting down with her to discuss her career trajectory.
Understanding the impact of failing to recognize and react to this growing issue
While it’s important to understand the perspective of the younger generations within your healthcare organization, it’s equally important to understand the impact it can have if you fail to address this issue as well.
Right now, we’re seeing several organizations simply relying on HR Managers to proactively chat with individual staff or conduct annual staff surveys in a bid to learn more about their employee’s aspirations and career trajectories.
Unfortunately, little is often done with this information, as it takes a significant amount of time to collate this information and a certain level of intuition to determine the next steps for each staff member.
This means any potential opportunities for younger care staff to progress in their career are often missed – leaving employees feeling neglected, confused and disenchanted with their organization.
The Consequences?
Unfortunately, this very common (and often overlooked or unseen) issue can lead to constant employee churn as staff begin to look for and find new opportunities elsewhere – potentially costing your healthcare organization significant amounts of money to replace these staff.
Not only that, but it also becomes difficult to build any sense of comradery or consistency within your teams, which can lead to lower levels of employee satisfaction – and the cycle of attrition continues.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The benefits of internal career development programs and succession planning for your healthcare organization
Now, imagine if your hospital had a single source of truth at a central level that could empower your organization to better support your staff and enable their career progression.
With this, you would no longer have to rely on basic methods, such as annual staff surveys, to understand their needs.
Instead, you could easily encourage your staff to develop their skills or move into a new role at any time of the year – immediately boosting employee morale and job satisfaction.
This internal talent marketplace can help to provide your younger care staff like Sarah with access to various career development programs and succession planning tools.
With this, they could easily outline their career aspirations, skills and future goals to help the decision-makers and HR Managers in your organization more easily identify opportunities to promote, upskill or reallocate these staff members in a way that truly aligns with their career trajectory.
In turn, your hospital would be able to increase staff retention, save on hiring costs and grow your organization with the help of a team that truly feels appreciated in their respective roles.
Here’s how you can empower your younger healthcare staff with an Internal Talent Marketplace.
With an internal talent marketplace, you can easily identify and facilitate career opportunities amongst your young care staff within your large healthcare system.
Of course, that’s exactly what the GoFIGR platform is designed to do.
Here’s how it works.
An Internal Talent Marketplace platform, GoFIGR is a Software as a Service (SaaS) designed to collect and intuitively analyse employee skills data so you can supercharge your Internal Mobility and truly embrace a streamlined model of internal career progression.
With valuable insights collected from your team, GoFIGR allows you to:
- identify your employees’ current skills
- align them with your business needs
- realise your team’s full potential
- reduce the cost of recruitment by upskilling from within
This way, you can open your employee’s eyes to potential career progressions and FIGR (Find, Inspire, Grow and Retain) young healthcare talent with data-driven strategies.
It’s time to provide your younger care staff with the opportunities they’re after.
While also reducing staff frustration and turnover.
Your future team is already working for you.
Don’t let that talent go to waste – allow them to grow their career AND drive your healthcare organization into its tomorrow in ways you never thought possible.
It’s the ultimate way to build internal mobility and foster a progressive workplace culture to minimise your reliance on the hiring cycle.
It’s a great way to save crucial hours in your day as well.
Contact GoFIGR today to discover how we can help you foster a future-focused workforce using our Internal Talent Marketplace platform.
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Helena Turpin spent 20 years in talent and HR innovation where she solved people-related problems using data and technology. She left corporate life to create GoFIGR where she helps mid-sized organizations to develop and retain their people by connecting employee skills and aspirations to internal opportunities like projects, mentorship and learning.
