Columbia-based University of Missouri Health Care is taking a multipronged approach to workforce growth, leading to a 9% increase in hiring across nursing and other roles over the past year.

“We know labor requires investment, so we’ve invested heavily in the talent pipeline — from exposing high school students to healthcare careers to recruiting internationally,” Chief Human Resources Officer Beth Alpers told Becker’s. “For nursing in particular, we’ve shifted from relying on job boards to placing campus recruiters directly in schools and building a stronger presence earlier in the process.”

Ms. Alpers said MU Health Care is working to spark interest in healthcare careers as early as middle and high school. Through partnerships with counselors, educators, and community organizations, students are introduced to clinical and non-clinical job opportunities.

She discusses these efforts in greater detail below.

Editor’s note: Responses are lightly edited for clarity and length.

Q: Given today’s financial pressures in healthcare, where are you having to make the toughest tradeoffs between investing in workforce growth and controlling labor costs?

Beth Alpers: Our organization realizes that labor requires investment. We are using data analytics to make informed decisions, but I don’t feel like we’re having to trade off so much. We have put a lot of effort into the talent pathways. We are doing a lot with schools to get middle and high school students exposed to healthcare careers that [do and do not] require a degree. … We’re doing a lot to educate counselors, administrators and educators — the influencers of those students — so that they’re not saying the old tagline of, “If you don’t like blood and guts, healthcare is not for you.” We need them to be aware that a hospital is like a city. There are careers for every interest and skill set.

We have jobs that include education and jobs that do not require education. Our workforce development programs, including a career institute with sponsored training for roles like certified medical assistants and surgical techs, and an online BSN program. Internal career conversations help employees advance, sometimes without additional formal training.

We are balancing recruitment with the use of agency, and we have a good international nurse recruitment firm, Shearwater, that we have hired 120 nurses to date. We have 80 in the pipeline, and we’ve hired them from multiple countries, and this vendor really works well to assimilate them and support them throughout their three years with us.

We work with the Chamber of Commerce, both locally and at the state level, on workforce initiatives. We work with the University of Missouri Extension on workforce initiatives. We work with a lot of organizations in the community that are helping underserved populations connect to and explore jobs that maybe they haven’t been exposed to.

We work with our own Thompson Center for Autism & Neurodevelopment at the University of Missouri/MU Health that supports kids with atypical neuro situations, like autism, to help them explore jobs and develop job skills. We have a program with the high schools for kids that have different abilities, and they spend their senior year here as part of the curriculum. They may work just parts of a job at the beginning of the school year, and by the end of the school year, they’re working the entire job, and they’re developing job skills so they’re hireable within our organization or across the community.

Q: When resources are limited, how do you decide which workforce initiatives to prioritize now versus postpone, and what criteria guide those choices?

BA: We have a very tight HR team that partners with our operational leaders, and will get operational leaders and their leadership together in workshops to talk about, What are the recruitment challenges? What are the staffing challenges? What are the training challenges? We take a holistic approach in HR support for our operational leaders.

Recently, we identified a need in environmental services, to emphasize the “why.” Why do you clean the room? Why is infection control so important? So we’re partnering with our learning and development department to sort of help beef up some of that and offer some training around that.

But it’s really about HR being a partner with finance, a partner with operational leaders, bringing everybody together and saying, is this a compensation issue? Is this a benchmarking for staffing issue? Is this a workforce issue? Do we need to find a different way to deliver the care or services?

Additionally, we’re part of the university, which has a nursing school. The nursing school started offering an unlicensed assistant personnel course providing a pathway to become a nurse assistant. Missouri, requires 75 hours of didactic and 100 hours of clinical for this role and the class provides college credit. We’re hiring certified nursing assistants out of that class every semester. A lot of them then go on to nursing school, or PT or OT, because that’s how they got interested in the course to begin with. We’re looking at ways to grab university students interested in healthcare, who may change their mind about med school or nursing career, and show them all the different things that they can do.

To further build awareness, MU Health Care hosts an annual career expo for middle and high school students. The event draws 700+ participants each year for hands-on activities across hospital departments. High schoolers and middle schools, are bussed into a big expo center, and there are different departments from the hospital with hands-on activities to show what you can do if you become a respiratory therapist or a physical therapist; For maintenance, there is an electric circuit board, so they get real hands-on experience with what that job might be like and what that work might be like. This year will be our fourth and we expect a 10% increase in the number of students this year.

Q: How are you balancing the push for innovation — such as AI and automation — with the need to protect jobs and maintain employee trust?

BA: Our biggest challenge with AI is figuring out the governance and security (HIPAA aspects of it), so that we can have a more deliberate program and start teaching people and leaders how they can do data analytics more efficiently, and spend less time on spreadsheets.

We are looking at clerical positions, nursing positions — where can we bring AI into that? In my C-suite, the executive assistants are starting to create AI agents to do simple tasks, like taking minutes from a meeting and creating a PowerPoint slide for our “chat with the chiefs” follow up items that are discussed at the executive leadership team meeting.

We’re focused on eliminating the things that aren’t value-added to them or the organization. But we have to work through: what platforms do we use? What access do we give people? How do we make sure it’s secure? Because there’s so much more fear about AI. At the same time, we recently implemented ambient listening for our physicians so that their time writing notes has drastically reduced, and they have a whole lot more time at home and with their family.

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