One of the oldest forms of training, apprenticeship, has new relevance in the fast-paced age of AI according to today’s WorkforceRx guest Vinz Koller, senior strategist for capacity building at Social Policy Research Associates and self-described apprenticeship evangelist. “The model of apprenticeship is particularly appropriate because in my view, apprenticeship is a look into the future. You don’t have to predict what things will be like in ten years. The workplace will evolve and you will evolve with it,” Koller tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. Tune-in to this enlightening episode to learn how Koller is working with local communities, states, and the US government to determine how to make work-based learning more accessible to more people, and what role apprenticeships could play in reducing student debt.

On this episode of WorkforceRx, we take a close look at a potentially transformative employee-owned cooperative model for in-home care workers that’s gaining traction in California. In the eyes of our guest, Aquilina Soriano Versoza, the higher pay and better working conditions that co-ops can provide will help grow an urgently needed workforce and address current injustices that prevail in the “wild west” of private home care, where pay can be as low as $5 per hour. The approach Versoza has helped develop as executive director of the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California includes on-the-job skills training, education in operating a co-op business, and the opportunity to work in teams. Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan as she explores how the crisis in home care could be an opportunity to improve the quality of life for both the seniors receiving care and the workers providing it.

“I think training is gonna be so different looking in the next few years than what we’re used to,” says Anson Green who brings a very seasoned eye to the workforce training landscape. After decades working in adult education, Green is now helping Tyson Foods train a diverse global workforce with limited digital and language skills. The big changes he sees coming are driven by AI-powered training programs that allow him to customize content by reading level, language and other factors with a few clicks. Another key factor is technology is getting easier to use. “Robots that five years ago would have taken an associate’s degree to be able to run, I could teach you how to run in an afternoon.” This is a great chance to learn about leading edge training programs at one of the world’s largest food companies and to find out about a hidden workforce training jewel in nearly every US community.

Rachel Wick, the senior program officer for Blue Shield of California Foundation, describes childcare and direct care provided in the home for the elderly and disabled as ‘the work that makes all other work possible.’ As she tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan on this episode of WorkforceRx, it’s time our society valued it as such and invested in the sector the way we invest in public schools and healthcare. Raising up this worker population and increasing economic security for other low-income communities is part of the foundation’s overall mission to remove barriers to health and wellbeing in order to build lasting and equitable solutions that will make California the healthiest state. Tune in to learn more about the role economic security plays in health, and how cooperative business models may be part of the answer to elevating a critically important workforce.

If you would love to know what’s on the minds of the leaders of the nation’s largest health systems as they tackle workforce challenges and a host of other issues, then this episode of WorkforceRx is for you. The well-placed source supplying this intelligence is Renee DeSilva, CEO of The Health Management Academy which provides advice, research, knowledge sharing, and leadership development for hospitals and other healthcare companies. DeSilva is encouraged by the energy and innovation she’s seeing around solutions such as upskilling current employees, leaning into skills-based hiring, and creating talent pipelines with local educators. “I’m seeing a lot of creativity and partnership energy around solving the workforce challenge structurally, and then also just making the folks that we do have more productive and creating more of a thriving environment around them,” she tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. You’ll leave this conversation with a better sense of the paths being taken to the future of care and the tactics leaders are using to get there.

Evolving employee expectations for working conditions and years of a tight labor market have created steady challenges for human resources professionals. We’ll take a look at some of those key problems and their solutions on this episode of WorkforceRx with Wendi Safstrom, president of the SHRM Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the world’s largest HR professional society. “We’re problem-solving based on research with the goal to help HR pros get better and help them lead positive social change in the workplace,” Safstrom tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. That change includes ensuring health equity at work, providing support for mental health needs and adopting a “skills-first” approach to hiring, which can provide opportunity to populations who have often been shut out of the hiring process. In this informative conversation, Wendi also addresses the use of AI in hiring, the need for HR staff to attend to their own mental health, and the free resources SHRM makes available to employers of all sizes.

For those concerned about teacher burnout and retention issues in K-12 education, Curtis Johnson has seen an innovative model that could provide an answer: let teachers run the schools. Johnson, a veteran educator, policy analyst and author, says there are already several hundred such schools in twenty-three states. During interviews for his book A New Deal for Teachers, he heard consistent messages about improved professional and personal fulfillment. “These schools hold on to most all of their teachers every year,” he tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. Johnson is attracted to ideas that upend what he considers failing models of education, as you might expect from the co-author of Disrupting Class, which argues for shifting to a personalized and mastery-based approach. Tune in for a candid conversation about breaking the grip of centralized systems, how K-12 education should incorporate AI, and why he believes up to half of colleges and universities in the US will close in the next decade.

Employees today have high expectations for compensation, the quality of their work experience, and the level of work-life balance. Our WorkforceRx guest, David Jarrard, adds a key item to that list: they also expect to have a voice when organizations make important decisions and that means leaders have to create opportunities for dialogue. “There’s ways for ideas to be shared back and forth so that even if the ideas that are shared aren’t the ones that are adopted, there was a sense of being heard,” he tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. To build trust and boost employee engagement, Jarrard advises that leaders should rely less on digital communications tools and instead dip into some old school techniques that leverage the ‘human touch.’ Tune in to learn what those are and for an array of other insights from a seasoned pro that more than 1,000 healthcare organizations across forty-five states have turned to for guidance on how to communicate with internal and external audiences about high stakes issues.

Workforce development as a tool for economic empowerment and social justice is in the DNA of Philadelphia OIC, and it is a philosophy that its leader, Sheila Ireland, is building on as she tackles persistently high rates of poverty and unemployment in what is ranked as the poorest big city in America. As she tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, Ireland believes the formula for success has to include high expectations of clients and private sector partners who can move trainees beyond the first rung of the career ladder. Tune in for a candid discussion of best practices in workforce training and stay tuned to hear about positive signs in Philadelphia of growing job opportunities in the tech sector and higher ed institutions being more responsive to the needs of lower-income students.

In the battle against declining enrollments and declining perceptions of value, higher education organizations need to be flexible and meet employers and students where they are, says today’s WorkforceRx guest Karilyn Van Oosten. Her company, Unitek Learning, is doing that literally by bringing its educational offerings on site to healthcare organizations in what it calls a “school in the box” model. Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan for a compelling conversation in which Van Oosten explains how that works, and also shares her insights on stackable credentials, ‘learn and earn’ models, and other signs of flexibility in workforce training programs that are trying to produce the healthcare providers we all need.

Rick Brooks has his hands full leading Rhode Island’s efforts to strengthen and grow its healthcare workforce, but he is seeing signs of new partnerships and creativity born of the crisis in staffing being faced by all states. Examples include collaboration among traditionally competitive higher ed institutions, and reconsideration of credentialing for nursing faculty and foreign trained health professionals, among other signs of innovation. In this expansive conversation with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, Brooks shares strategies and insights on a wide array of issues from loan repayments to clinical placements to redesigning career ladders. It’s an impressive menu of options that might just inspire some creative thinking of your own.

Today’s WorkforceRx guest wants to make sure one key facet of the growing problem of homelessness is not overlooked as solutions are discussed. “There’s a lot of over-representation of older people in the homelessness rates, and older Black Californians — and this is a staggering statistic — are five times more likely to become homeless than their white counterparts,” says Dr. Sarita Mohanty, president and CEO of The SCAN Foundation, whose work is centered in the nexus of age, poverty and equity. As one of the largest foundations in the US focused on improving the quality of health and life for older adults, The SCAN Foundation supports a wide variety of initiatives to address the complex factors preventing many Americans from aging well. On this episode, Dr. Mohanty shares some positive notes with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan about cross-sector collaborations that are accelerating solutions to this critically important problem affecting Americans of all ages.

Because state departments of health play a huge role in America’s healthcare system, the workforce challenges they face have broad implications. On this episode of WorkforceRx, Paula Nickelson, Director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, shares strategies from student loan reform to expanding physician residencies to better data management that she hopes will bend the curve on this crisis. Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan for an insightful state-level perspective on workforce and health system challenges confronting the entire nation.

“If I looked at higher education writ large, as we’ve traditionally defined it, I’d say that the patient is sick right now,” says Michael Horn, a prominent national voice on reimagining education at both the K-12 and post-secondary levels. His prescriptions include thoughtful, learner-centered use of online instruction, getting schools to focus more on improving learning models, and moving to a competency-based approach. Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan as she explores Horn’s disruptive innovations to address those issues as well as organizational model change, social-emotional deficits and new learning options in higher education. And be sure to stay tuned for a sneak peek at Horn’s next book which focuses on how to develop a deeper sense of what you’re looking for when changing jobs or careers.

Doctors who realize that creating a local jobs program can be as important to helping their patients as writing a prescription have the kind of broad perspective that today’s WorkforceRx guest wants all health providers to adopt. “I think that context is oftentimes lost on providers in medical school or nursing school where they’re not connecting the patient to the entire context of their lives,” says Dr. Sriram Shamasunder, co-founder of the Health Equity Action and Leadership initiative at UC San Francisco. Each class of HEAL Fellows includes a mix of doctors from the US, Navajo Nation and the Global South. “It’s this really incredible learning community where they’re doing clinical and project work to become better advocates and better leaders,” he tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. Tune in for a thoughtful look at using medicine as a way to establish trust in resource-denied communities and how HEAL is a potential solution to address vacancies in Native communities.

It’s estimated that less than 5% of employees use company-sponsored tuition benefits, and according to Dr. David Ferreira, paying the upfront cost of tuition is high on the list. That’s why he is launching a program at Charter Oak State College, inspired by an idea in Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan’s book WorkforceRx, that turns the traditional tuition reimbursement model on its head. “There’s no money out of pocket for the employee, there’s no cost on the employer side because they’ll be reimbursed, and Charter Oak is going to get more students.” Get all the details, learn about the program’s ‘all you can eat’ design, and find out how employers are reacting to the idea in this eye-opening conversation.

Like all states, California is facing a shortage of physicians but today’s WorkforceRx guest says the definition of shortage needs to go beyond just numbers to include their practice location and cultural diversity. “Oftentimes, we don’t have enough access to physicians in particular areas or to culturally dynamic physicians,” says Lupe Alonzo-Diaz, president and CEO of Physicians for a Healthy California. As she explains to Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, PHC tackles the issue by expanding physician training opportunities in underserved areas and by incentivizing early career physicians and dentists to accept Medicaid patients through loan forgiveness. “ This engaging conversation also explores trends in team-based care and previews a new report on how physicians who are women of color fared during the pandemic.

In the struggle to fill ongoing gaps in healthcare staffing, the days of waiting for people to apply for openings are over, says human resources veteran Laura Beeth. “We’re going out deeply into the communities, especially communities with high social determinants of health, and really working partnerships to help them move into healthcare careers,” says the vice president for Workforce Partnerships at Fairview Health Services, which is the second largest private employer in Minnesota. In this episode of WorkforceRx, Beeth and Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan share useful strategies on leveraging learn-and-earn programs, reducing employee education costs, diversifying the workforce and the need for a more open-minded approach to hiring. Tune in for a valuable dose of wisdom from the woman known as ‘the godmother of healthcare workforce development.’

Historic investments in infrastructure and combatting climate change are having an impact on the job market with some economists forecasting the creation of millions of jobs over the next decade. Harnessing these investments to boost economic mobility is a key focus of our WorkforceRx guest, Rachel Korberg, executive director and co-founder of the Families and Workers Fund, a coalition of philanthropies led by the Ford Foundation and Schmidt Futures. “We’re all working together with the idea that this is a really once in a generation opening to advance economic mobility for all,” she tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. Join us for a fascinating look at an innovative collective impact model that aims to create upwardly mobile careers for one million people, and learn how frontline workers are helping to decide how millions of dollars are invested in this effort.

The use of simulation in healthcare training used to be confined to actors posing as patients and the use of medical mannequins. But the options have grown far beyond that to include 3D virtual reality, augmented reality, and game-based learning, among other approaches. On this episode of WorkforceRx, we’re going to get an overview of the space with one of its leading experts, Dr. Parvati Dev, CEO of SimTabs. Dr. Dev has four decades of experience developing tech solutions for life sciences education in industry and academia, including groundbreaking work at Stanford University. Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan for this enlightening conversation in which Dr. Dev offers advice on how to decide when simulation is the right tool, shares her views on the extent to which simulation can replace in-person clinical training, and offers a vision for how, with the help of AI, an ecosystem of training tools can be created to move the industry to a higher level of impact.