Health care employment still flying high while national jobs picture softens

WASHINGTON — America’s lucrative job market of recent years is now long gone, with the unemployment rate recently rising to its highest level since October 2021. But there’s still some serious momentum in one industry.

These workers have plentiful jobs available to them across the country and are raking in higher wage gains than the broader private sector. Employers in this industry also hire quickly and typically offer cushy perks such as massive sign-on bonuses and tuition reimbursement.

Enter America’s top job creator: The mighty health care industry.

So far in 2024, health care has added a stunning 59,000 jobs a month, on average, through July, according to Labor Department data released in early August. That’s the most of any industry, and it includes positions such as nurses, home health aides and emergency medical technicians.

Demand for health care workers remains red hot, according to recent government data on job openings. In June, the health care and social assistance industry had the highest seasonally adjusted job openings rate of any industry, at 7.6%, well above the total rate across the job market of 5.5% that month.

“Health care is a major, major engine of growth. I mean, it’s just incredible how much demand there is for those workers,” said Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist.

That has translated into fatter paychecks for health care workers compared to the general private sector. In the second quarter from a year earlier, employees in the health care and social assistance industry saw their wages grow 4.5%, a stronger clip than the private sector’s 4% gain during the same period, according to the latest data from the Employment Cost Index.

“Our population is aging and we are still recovering in a lot of ways from the Covid-19 pandemic, which really put a strain on a lot of our resources,” David Mafe, chief diversity officer and vice president of human resources at UCHealth, a nonprofit health system in the Denver metropolitan area, told CNN. “Health care has been going through these hiring challenges for a really long time.”

Health care services are also mostly resistant to the ebb and flows of the economic cycle. For example, even during recessions, people will still need knee surgeries, C-sections, chemotherapy or any other necessary medical service.

Higher wage growth and robust benefits

The competition for workers is so fierce in health care that employers are putting their best foot forward.

UCHealth, which employs 33,000 people, usually has 2,700 job openings at any given time, Mafe said. He added that it’s been particularly challenging hiring respiratory therapists and skilled positions related to imaging or radiology.

“We’ve had to be more aggressive with salaries over the last year and a half than before.” Mafe said. “We’re constantly looking at our benefits and ensuring that the things we offer to our staff are actually relevant to them and relevant to their families.”

UCHealth employees who work an average of 20 hours or more per week have “the opportunity to be eligible for 100% of tuition, books and fees paid for by UCHealth for specific educational degrees,” according to a description of the program. That includes college degrees and clinical certificates, “enabling those in entry-level roles to grow into professional and higher-income positions,” the description details.

Quicker to hire

Novant Health, a health care provider of around 40,000 employees based in North Carolina that operates across four states, has been on a massive hiring spree, dishing out hefty sign-on bonuses to sweeten the deal, Sebastien Girard, the company’s chief people and belonging officer, told CNN.

The number of nurses the company hired increased by 46% from 2022 to 2023 and is “on track to surpass 2023 recruitment numbers this year,” the company said in a statement to CNN. Newly hired nurses in “high-demand specialties” are offered sign-on bonuses of up to $30,000, the company said.

Novant Health has been hiring at an even faster clip recently: Girard said a new process to speed up hiring has resulted in reducing the time to fill positions by 91%, now taking 10 days to successfully hire a nurse.

“Virtually every nurse or health care tech in the country has a job,” Girard said. “We’re recruiting from all over the nation.”

So, how do I pivot to health care?

Mafe and Girard both said they regularly hear of newly hired workers who just pivoted to a career in health care. It will require going back to school, and the length of time depends on the specific job. For example, it takes less than a year to become a certified phlebotomist, for which there is strong demand. However, becoming a registered nurse could take anywhere from two to four years. Since demand for health care workers is so hot, however, students are usually offered a job right before they graduate or obtain a certification, Mafe and Girard both said.

Pollak recalled one worker who pivoted to health care and immediately reaped the rewards.

“One job seeker we spoke with recently was a personal trainer, and during the pandemic, with all the lockdowns in California, she realized she couldn’t make ends meet, and so she borrowed money to do nursing school,” Pollak said.

“She’s now a (neonatal intensive care unit) nurse, and she said she feels she could go anywhere and do whatever she wants. She’s been able to get a remarkable amount of flexibility and set her hours, and she got hired before she even graduated, with no interview.”