As Shortages Loom, Many Young Healthcare Workers Want New Jobs

The capacity of the U.S. healthcare workforce is in critical condition.

In a recent report, education benefits platform Workforce Edge projected a shortfall of 500,000 critical healthcare workers by 2038. A separate analysis by healthcare educator Covista predicted the shortage of full-time health workers — including physicians, nurses and employees in allied health, behavioral health and home health — will reach 2.2 million by 2040.

As these workers leave the field, they’re not always being replaced. Workforce Edge found one-third of nurses were over the age of 50 at the end of 2023, and across the healthcare workforce, 70% of the field’s youngest workers said they plan to look for a new role in the coming year.

The industry is facing a dual challenge: Not simply that the current supply of workers isn’t enough, but also that even more of them will be needed in the future.

“The Medicare population is growing and aging. Chronic disease is on the rise, and complexity of care is increasing. There just isn’t sufficient capacity,” said Anthony Reyes, a senior economic policy analyst at nonprofit think tank The Conference Board. “If it really were just about four-year college and then medical school, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Even if the pipeline were working smoothly, it’s not designed to take on this kind of compounding demand.”

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Appealing to the Next Generation

Young workers entering the healthcare profession are faced with various challenges, according to the experts interviewed in this article. These challenges may include:

Being placed in a specialty they didn’t get to explore much as students.
Administrative tasks that give them less face time with patients.
Fewer opportunities to learn through mentorship.

“They came into this work to care for patients, and when the job doesn’t look like what they signed up for, they go find one that does,” said Michael Betz, Covista’s chief growth and innovation officer and the president of Walden University. “The best fix is to close that gap before day one. That means giving people real exposure to the work before they commit and supporting them once they’re in the building.”

The Conference Board’s Reyes also pointed to what healthcare workers refer to as “pajama time”: at-home, off-hours time spent on administrative tasks such as electronic health record charting, billing, insurance paperwork and messaging. The common practice has been linked to physician burnout.

Generation Z healthcare workers are less likely to take that practice at face value — they expect a job described as a 9-to-5 to truly stick to those hours, Reyes said. More than ever, young employees are asking whether the roles they’re entering reconcile with their expectations of professional opportunity and work-life balance.

Reyes also noted that even though compensation still matters to this group, so does strong management, visible leadership, robust onboarding, mentorship, predictable and sustainable workloads, and career advancement and continuing education opportunities.

“Both the expectations and the values that Gen Z brings are unique in a workforce where we have at least five generations of people working right now,” he said.

Thinking Outside the Box

Healthcare’s workforce problem isn’t a matter of low interest.

“There’s no shortage of people who want to be nurses or physicians,” Covista’s Betz said. “The problem is capacity. There aren’t enough seats in nursing and medical schools, and not enough clinical training capacity for that last mile of the journey.”

To address clinical placement bottlenecks, he said:

Health systems must treat capacity as a strategic asset;
Training partnerships must deliver employees prepared to hit the ground running; and,
Policymakers must fund more residencies and facilitate additional teaching opportunities for clinicians.

Betz added the healthcare field needs to find ways to directly target nontraditional students, including working adults, older students, career-changers and parents. That means bolstering online programs and those offering evening and weekend classes, along with tuition assistance.

“Employers that build in that flexibility are tapping talent others are leaving on the table,” he said.

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