Building a Healthcare Workforce Pipeline: Your Next Hire May Already Work for You

Key Insights:

• The healthcare workforce today faces many challenges, including worker shortages, retention issues, and employee initiatives that don't work due to staffing constraints. These can be complicated by additional factors like rising costs, demographic shifts, and traditional (yet ineffective) talent strategies.
• Creating an internal healthcare workforce pipeline, such as by offering training programs, can help organizations retain high performers by providing them with growth opportunities. Training has also been linked with retention, job performance, and workers' problem-solving and interpersonal communication skills.
• Nasium Training's solutions are designed to support your workforce development strategy. Our healthcare employee training programs can be tailored to your needs and goals, offering your employees wraparound support as they prepare to fill new roles.

When facing a talent shortage, your first reaction may be to ramp up your recruitment initiatives. You intensify your search for local talent, maybe even offering relocation benefits to applicants from other geographical areas. However, one often overlooked strategy is to hire from within and provide healthcare employee training programs to help prepare current employees for new roles. While this may not be a traditional approach, industry statistics suggest that if we don't change what we're doing soon, there's not going to be much of a workforce left.

Healthcare Workforce Pulse Check — The Numbers Are Alarming

One of the first actions healthcare providers take when assessing a patient's health is to look at their vitals and recent test results. The information collected from these diagnostics can tell a practitioner whether areas for concern exist.

Perform this same type of analysis on the healthcare workforce today, and the data is alarming:

• 47 states are projected to have a primary care physician shortage by 2037¹
• 42 states are likely to experience a shortage of nursing staff by 2030²
• Only 1 in 3 healthcare workers say they're satisfied with their jobs, and 50% feel exhausted in their current roles³
• 57% of employees who feel their job is unsustainable are looking for work with different employers⁴
• Even though employee initiatives may be offered, 50% of workers say they lack impact due to staffing constraints⁵

These numbers reflect a reality that many healthcare organizations know all too well. Current retention and recruitment models aren't working, which can have a major impact on the workforce tomorrow.

Future Projections Reinforce the Need for a New Approach

In its 2026 Health Care Workforce Scan, the American Hospital Association (AHA) identified six factors that are projected to reshape the industry's workforce strategies in the years ahead:⁶

• #1: Rising costs that reduce organizational flexibility
• #2: A demographic shift, in which an aging population increases workforce demands
• #3: Technology expansion that requires training, governance, and change management
• #4: Changing worker expectations, which can lead to talent loss if they're not met
• #5: Traditional workforce pipelines that aren't keeping up with demands
• #6: Geographic disparities in rural and underserved areas

Approximately 92 million people live in a primary care Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) as of December 2, 2025.⁷

These challenges have caused healthcare organizations to rethink staffing approaches and care delivery, according to the AHA.⁸ Additionally, forward-leaning organizations are switching focus from short-term crisis management to long-term planning to build workforce resilience.

A traditional workforce development model often involves external hiring. However, this overlooks one of an organization's most valuable resources: current employees.

Your Next New Hire May Already Be on Your Payroll

Taking an employee currently assigned to one role and training them to fill another, referred to as reskilling, can offer several advantages. Current employees are already familiar with your organization's expectations, policies, and procedures, which can reduce onboarding time and effort. They also have established internal relationships, which can help bring the entire team together.

Research indicates that providing employees with access to training opportunities can have other benefits, too. For example, one study on the impact of training development programs in a hospital setting found a positive correlation between training programs and job performance, retention, problem-solving skills, and interpersonal communication skills.⁹

The case for providing training to reduce turnover is strong. The Work Institute's 2025 Retention Report indicates that the most preventable reason for employees leaving their jobs in 2024 was related to career development — which encompassed a lack of growth opportunities, inadequate career progression, or insufficient professional development — ranking higher than issues related to health and family, work-life balance, and several other factors that could cause employees to look for work elsewhere.¹⁰

Internal Mobility in Action: An Illustration of Employee Progression

An MGMA Stat poll revealed that medical assistant positions were the most difficult to fill in practices today.¹¹ To make matters worse, these occupations are projected to grow 12% from 2024 to 2034, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).¹² This would result in roughly 112,300 openings each year, on average, during that time. Here's what creating an internal pipeline of medical assistants could look like at your organization.

You have reception clerks, cafeteria workers, and maintenance staff who are high performers in your organization. They're always on time, work with a smile, and are consistently given high marks from their supervisors. After initiating an internal survey, you learn that several would be interested in a direct care position. You offer them medical assistant training, they complete the course, and you now have an internal talent pipeline — no advertising, interviewing, or onboarding required.

Let's take this one step further. After medical assistant training, some team members do extremely well in their new roles. With the next round of surveys, you learn that a few of them have a passion for cardiac care or radiography. With an internal mobility training strategy in place, you can provide them with training in these areas, preparing them for cardiovascular technologist or limited scope radiography roles.

What's the result?

• You could retain a high performer who may have pursued work with another employer if not offered the growth opportunities they desired.
• Team members that you've helped achieve their career goals can become champions for your brand and refer other high performers for openings in your organization, also serving as positive influences and examples for other employees.
• Critical staffing gaps can be filled internally instead of spending money on external hiring.
• You've created a healthcare talent pipeline for multiple roles within your organization.
• Everyone can win.

How a Training Strategy Can Support Organizational Resilience

Organizational resilience refers to a healthcare system's ability to continue functioning, even potentially growing or improving, when exposed to stressors. A 2025 review published in the Journal of Healthcare Management found that developing proactive strategies is a key component of organizational resilience in healthcare and can help reduce or prevent adverse consequences.¹³

A proactive strategy that organizations can implement is employee upskilling and reskilling. Continuous training can help staff stay current with evolving treatments, technologies, and protocols. Structured training programs that enable employee progression within an organization also help create clear career pathways for team members.

An effective training strategy can also help support organizations' patient care goals. Well-trained professionals deliver safer, more effective care, and those who receive ongoing training are better prepared for complex cases, contributing to better patient outcomes.¹⁴

A study published in the International Advanced Research Journal in Science, Engineering and Technology adds that effective training improves individual competency, enhances team coordination, and can benefit overall hospital productivity.¹⁵ This study further emphasized the need for customized training plans based on role requirements and continuous feedback.

Address Worker Shortages With Employee Reskilling Programs

In 2025, the average annual turnover rate across all healthcare roles was 22.7%.¹⁶ Retention issues can exacerbate worker shortages, leaving some departments consistently understaffed. Turnover has also been linked with increased medical errors, longer hospital stays, lower patient satisfaction, and reduced employee job satisfaction, according to an umbrella review of healthcare turnover published in BMC Health Services Research, in addition to potentially interrupting service continuity and undermining service quality.¹⁷

Reskilling programs can help prepare current team members to fill allied health positions with staffing gaps. Roles to consider reskilling employees for include:

• Medical assistants. The backbone of outpatient care, medical assistants are often tasked with rooming patients, measuring vitals, and providing both administrative and clinical support. These professionals can also be valuable when scaling primary care and specialty clinics, enabling practitioners to expand their patient lists due to having adequate clinical support.
• Cardiovascular technologists. Roughly 3,800 cardiovascular technologist and technician roles are projected to open each year, on average, between 2024 and 2034, according to BLS data.¹⁸ This is due to an increase in cardiac disease prevalence, particularly in older adults. Reskilling staff for these roles can help organizations meet diagnostic demands. In fact, cardiovascular outpatient care is projected to grow 25% through 2034.¹⁹
• Pharmacy technicians. The BLS indicates that pharmacy technician jobs are also expected to increase over the next decade, growing at a rate that is faster than average for all occupations.²⁰ It cites several reasons for this, including an aging population (which typically uses more prescription medications), an increase in chronic diseases overall, and these workers taking on a greater role, performing tasks previously done by pharmacists, such as collecting information and handling prescription transfers.
• Limited scope radiography technologists. A statistical analysis revealed that imaging utilization in 2055 could be up to 26.9% higher than it was in 2023.²¹ Reskilling staff for limited scope radiography roles to perform basic X-ray services can help support increased imaging demands in urgent care facilities, outpatient centers, and other healthcare organizations, especially those in rural settings that may experience difficulties in finding and/or retaining trained radiologists.

How these programs can support evolving operations

Some healthcare systems are redesigning care delivery to increase clinical touch, reduce wait times, and expand their ability to see more patients — all without a hefty financial investment.²²

Strategies to provide quality care can include delegating routine and technical tasks to trained allied health professionals. These roles are lower cost compared to physicians and nurses, making them helpful for managing labor costs. Plus, many allied health training programs offer shorter training pathways than other, more advanced clinical roles.

Nasium Training Can Help You Reshape Your Workforce Strategy

Whether you're facing healthcare workforce challenges related to patient demographic shifts, technology expansions, changing worker expectations, a traditional talent pipeline that no longer works, or something else, Nasium Training is here to help.

Our healthcare employee training solutions are designed to help prepare your workforce for a variety of clinical and non-clinical allied health roles, including medical assistant, licensed health agent, cardiovascular technologist, sterile processing, and more. We also offer a Mental Health Foundations course that provides employees with information and tools to support both patients' and their own mental health.

Why choose Nasium Training?

Our solutions can be tailored to address your specific challenges, needs, and goals. Additionally, if you require or prefer that your professionals be certified, certification prep is provided in many of our training programs (with the first exam attempt fee included) and, in some cases, is offered as a standalone solution.²³

Additionally, at Nasium Training, our support extends to both our employer partners and their employees. Employees receive wraparound support to address study- or learning-related issues or concerns. We also provide employers with feedback about employee training progression. This helps support transparency and engagement in the training process.

Contact us to learn more. We look forward to discussing how we can help you create an internal talent pipeline that can help your organization improve and grow.