MINNEAPOLIS – Emily Zabor graduated with a master’s degree in biostatistics from the University of Minnesota this year, right in the middle of the worst job market in decades.
No problem. “I expected to have good prospects,” Zabor said. “I knew it was a field that was growing.”
Even before graduating, Zabor accepted a $75,000-a-year job at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, helping to design and analyze clinical studies. In fact, all 21 students in Zabor’s program have found work, with drug companies, medical device firms and public health agencies.
After a tough couple of years, health care hiring is up again. While the pace of new jobs remains far below that of a few years ago, health care organizations have more job postings up right now than they have for months.
For example, Allina Hospitals and Clinics, the biggest group in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, is looking to fill some 900 jobs. That’s not far from the peak of four or five years ago, when there were 1,000 openings and signing bonuses were common. Fairview Health Services, the second-biggest group, has more than 500 openings.
But the recovery remains tenuous and uneven. While the jobs range from food workers to lab techs to registered nurses, in many cases employers are looking for specialized skills. Experienced nurses are in demand, while fresh nursing graduates continue to struggle to find jobs.
Many of the job categories are new, such as information technology specialists and data analysts, shaped by federal and state reform and demands by public and private insurers for the industry to cut waste, improve outcomes and generally do more with less.
“It’s better,” Allina recruitment director David Johnson said of the hiring landscape. “But different.”
In the past, hospitals and clinics sailed through recessions unscathed. But a confluence of events made the last slump different: cuts in government programs, a squeeze by private insurers and the spread of high-deductible plans, which caused many consumers to think twice before seeking medical care.
Nationally, growth in health care jobs has stayed below 2 percent year-on-year through 2009 and 2010.
While the aging population means hospitals and clinics will need more doctors and nurses, newer positions typically associated with manufacturing are emerging as health care goes through the kind of upheaval the auto industry went through not so long ago.
“We want a highly reliable, efficiently manufactured unit of service,” said Daniel Zismer, who teaches health policy and management at the University of Minnesota. “We also want a compassionate system, but who doesn’t?”
The federal government is requiring hospitals and doctors’ offices to have electronic medical records by 2014 and is providing millions of dollars in federal funding toward that. Trouble is, “there’s a real shortage of people” to make it happen, said Julie Jacko, who teaches health informatics at the University of Minnesota.
Just defining the parameters of these new jobs can present a headache.
“We’re seeing a lot of process-improvement roles,” said Johnson of Allina. “The challenge is we don’t always know what we want because the roles are new.”
Among other things, Allina is looking for data analysts and performance improvement analysts, both at average salaries of $74,000.
Even traditional health care roles are changing as the industry prepares for federal health reform to kick in fully in 2014, when a crush of newly insured Americans are expected to enter the system. Many clinics are creating teams where physicians will care for a greater number of patients, with help from nurse practitioners, physician assistants and other professionals.
In this environment, experience is prized. “The roles of nurse practitioner and physician assistant are growing,” said Karen Mulder, director of coordinated care practice at University of Minnesota Physicians.
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In the past two years, the practice has put about 20 nurses in a new role: care coordinator for complex patients. These roles typically require three to five years of experience.
Meanwhile, new nursing graduates continue to have a hard time finding work.
“It is still very, very tight out there,” said Alice Swan, associate dean of nursing at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. “It’s tied to the economy generally, but also more cautiousness in not knowing what’s happening with health reform.”
At St. Catherine’s, only 15 percent of the 83 nursing students who graduated last May had jobs by graduation. Some relocated to other states to find work. Others are working in home care after failing to find higher-paid nursing work in hospitals.
In a few cases, newly licensed nurses have taken jobs as health unit coordinators, a lower-level job doing things such as coordinating supplies. “It’s a secretarial kind of job, but it is a job,” Swan said. “And it might position you for another job.”
Zabor, 30, wasn’t always headed toward a health care career. She majored in anthropology for her first degree and spent time as a Peace Corps environmental volunteer in Ghana.
“I’m a very analytical person, and knew I liked working with numbers,” she said. She decided to pursue a two-year graduate degree in biostatistics, figuring it would improve her job prospects.
She was right. Last spring, she found herself weighing two job offers, including one from a Minnesota medical center. She picked Memorial Sloan-Kettering because it was a bigger program and she wanted the experience of living in New York.
Zabor took the summer off and started Sept. 1 as an assistant research biostatistican. Already, she’s working on half a dozen projects.
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(c) 2010, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)