Michael Jones, Director of Workforce Development at UCSF Health: Where Goodwill and Good Business Strategy Meet

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, an ongoing conversation with leaders and innovators offering insights into creating a future-ready workforce. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, registered healthcare apprenticeships are up 43% in the last five years as employers turn to “earn while you learn” models to fill staffing gaps that traditional degree pipelines aren’t filling fast enough.

Today, we’re going to highlight an institution that’s a great example of this trend by speaking with Michael Jones, Director of Workforce Development at UCSF Health, the second largest employer in the Bay Area here in California. He just recently received the Chancellor’s Exceptional Service Award, so congratulations, Mike.

In that role, Mike has led new initiatives to prepare historically underrepresented communities for healthcare careers in partnership with employers, educators, and other stakeholders. One example is a new radiology technologist pathway program that I’m eager to learn more about. Thanks very much for joining us today, Mike.

Michael Jones
Thank you, Van. I really appreciate the opportunity to connect and have a discussion around what I considered one of the most important aspects of our strategy for workforce going forward, not only as a city, but also as a state and a country. Really happy to be here.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Well, I can’t wait to learn about the best practices that you’re deploying, but before we start talking about career pathway programs, I’m curious about your own path. What drew you to this space and also your current role at UCSF?

Michael Jones
Thank you for that question. It was really serendipitous. I often tell people that my first paid job was a coat-check clerk, and I had the privilege of being able to work in environments where I first learned the importance of customer support and customer service. I also learned the importance of being able to understand the skill set and the value that you brought to an employer, and if I took a step back even further than that, just looking at my own parents, my mom and my dad, great examples in my life growing up, their journey to where they ended up in their professional career was only a testament, in my opinion, to career ladders and the steps that they took.

Both of my parents started off in hospitality, and they were in the proverbial front of the house. They supported most of the local maintenance and most of the local property management work that was required for one of the major hotel chains, and through years of working in that organization, they managed to move all the way through into leadership positions. At the time, I didn’t recognize that that was what a career pathway and a career ladder looks like, but for me, when I got the chance to actually start my own career, I was able to reflect on that experience and seeing how great my parents were in their career journey, and understood very clearly early on that the skill sets that I was learning in my early teens and my late teens were applicable to the jobs that I would like to do at that point. It did not mean that there were not other opportunities to continue to advance my skills, and I had to be very prescriptive about what that meant.

So being prescriptive and being understanding that the skills and tools that I needed to develop were not just about just-in-time strategies, but rather what is the market saying that it needs in the next five years, what is it saying that it needs in the next ten years. Through that, I found myself doing a lot more work with local municipalities in the Midwest. I also then worked with a major CPG organization, Walgreens Boots Alliance, where I was at the corporate office collaborating on some of the work that oversaw the recruitment strategies for the eight thousand stores that we had at the time across the nation.

Through that experience, two things really clicked for me. It showed that business strategy, when it’s done right, could have a direct impact on the communities, not only locally but nationally. Secondly, it also showed me that the communities that we were working in at the time had really good ideas about what made their communities work. They had really great ideas about what careers and what skill sets were necessary, and so I took that information, I took that opportunity to learn that and moved it into my next opportunity, which was at a local academic health system in the Midwest.

Through that, I worked in place-based strategies, and oftentimes you may hear me say individuals from disinvested communities. Disinvestment — regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected class — specifically means that the industries that held that community together, that held that city together through one means or another, they had to decide to withdraw or dismantle or reduce the impact that they were having in that area, which then subsequently left individuals who were trained in that environment or that industry without an opportunity to grow their career or to support their family. So my life’s work, I like to say, is that I focus on communities that were once thriving, but now have the opportunity to pivot and really advance even further in the work that they’re doing.

All of this work led me to UCSF, where I’ve now had the privilege of being, for five years, working with an amazing team in the anchor institution mission work that’s being led by Wylie Liu. Under that umbrella, and also in direct correlation with our HR teams, we have been able to make substantial gains in supporting individuals from the local San Francisco community, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and being able to attain family-sustaining wages. We did this not in a vacuum. We did this through direct partnership with local entities that knew the environment, that knew the communities, that knew the challenges, and also knew the solutions based on what community members had shared in the past.

By partnering with those organizations, I took a direct lens in terms of what are the opportunities within UCSF that we need to gain greater foothold in to better support our patients and their families. In understanding that, how do we pair that with the community members that are seeking growth opportunities?

I’ll give you one quick example of this, and this is around our Excel program. Our ECXEL program is about excellence through community training where we support individuals in being able to get into what we consider a medical administrative assistant role. These are the individuals that you see at the front desk when you first walk into a clinic or when you call a clinic to schedule an appointment. We created a strategic partnership with a local Bay Area nonprofit, and through that partnership, we’ve been able to see hundreds of individuals move from, at times, three hundred percent below the poverty level into family-sustaining wages and even into management opportunities at the organization.

Once again, it’s not saying that what we are doing has to be so radical and so phenomenal that it is recreating the wheel. It’s simple. We understand what our demand is, we understand what our internal needs are. We just have the opportunity right now to pair that with the community and what they’re also seeking, and this is why I believe organizations like Futuro Health have a very strategic position within the future of work and how we design workforce strategies that are uplifting communities and uplifting organizations equally.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Well, thank you for the call-out of Futuro Health, and we are also so pleased that you were able to share some of your story with us and what shaped you and your approach to workforce development. I’m wondering — and I think many listeners will wonder — you had to convince internal stakeholders to work with the community…”pair with the community” is your phrase. Tell us a little bit more about how you decided, when you first started this work, where to focus, or which occupations or which business unit to focus on. I would love if you could decode that for some of the listeners.

Michael Jones
Absolutely. I think with large organizations like ours, what you will find is that you have two very distinctive communities. You have your internal community, which is every single person that considers you their employer and that they love showing up to work for every day, that is your first community. Then you have your second community, which is everyone outside of those four walls that you support and that you really want to make sure continues to thrive in the environment that you’re in physically.

Once we understood that there were two different communities — all with the same desire to advance and to grow and to deepen their knowledge — we had to take a step back and understood that the approach may be different. For example, for an incumbent individual that is currently employed with the organization, they may need added support around days off so that they could continue their education and that their department still has the efficiencies that they need, or they’re not missing staff time, so support in wages, support in backfills for that individual’s department, et cetera.

Then your other community, equally as important, they may need additional support when it comes to deeper wraparound support, such as maybe transportation, food insecurity support, et cetera. So by mapping all of these different potential categories of needs, it helped my team and I better prepare for how we show up and show up really good to the people that we were supporting.

Now, in terms of getting the internal leadership on board, that was probably the easiest part of this process. They’ve been on board since the very moment they, in my humble opinion, considered San Francisco their physical home to have UCSF. The reason why I’m saying that it was really easy is because when I started five years ago, going on six years now, we had so many individual unique programs that were operating on their own because people were so motivated, and they still are motivated, to do really good work in the community. What my job and my team’s job then became was to ensure that we all communicated, we were all having similar strategies or at least an administrative strategy that says what we do and how we do it needs to be aligned so that there is consistency amongst the programs. We’ve been able to really ensure that from an administrative level, when we show up, we’re providing equal or the same services and offerings to individuals internally.

But I will say that our leadership team has consistently over the years invested and really made opportunities available for individuals who are either getting upskilled or getting trained to come into the organization. It’s a phrase that many listening to this podcast may have heard before, but it’s the “outside in and inside up” strategy, and it’s really making sure that we are removing barriers. We’re not lowering job requirements, that is definitely not what we’re doing. What we’re looking at is if we have somebody that’s qualified for the job and they need to show up on Monday morning for the first day of their shift, do they have the resources necessary? Do they have childcare support? Do they have transportation support? Do they have clothing that matches the environment that they will need to be in?
So these are the things that I will say that we are very keenly aware of and that we try our very best to ensure that we’re supporting individuals equally.

Once again, when I mention community, it has no resemblance to race, gender or ethnicity, because I believe that when the tides rise because of the work we do, all boats lift equally. The work we’re doing is, yes, being done by UCSF, but all of our other healthcare colleagues in the Bay Area, I think, also benefit from what we are collectively doing. The way I see it is we could train ten individuals to be medical assistants, for example, and nine out of the ten may decide to come to UCSF as their place of employment. The other one individual is a net benefit to the entire region because now that is a well-trained individual that could go and support another one of the healthcare facilities in the area and support patients who are the direct outcome of all the work that we’re doing.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Let me pull on one of the threads that you mentioned, which is that if it’s an incumbent employee, they may need some release time, backfill time, and the mechanics of that. I understand that you report into the anchor institution leader. Is that a centralized budget that you’re able to provide backfill and back wages, or is that a decentralized practice that UCSF has? What do you recommend?

Michael Jones
I’ll start with what I recommend, and then I’ll describe what we have internally. What I recommend for any organization, whether you’re in healthcare or not, I think your workforce that you currently have is a captive audience. You hired them for a reason, you hired them because they were skilled to do the job and you invested the time and resources to get them there. So ensuring that you have a centralized budget — which is what I recommend for any organization listening — is a key factor because that centralized budget helps you to ensure that you have key metrics and key measures that are put in place and equally distributed to anyone that is working within your organization that may want to take part.

Some organizations may allocate several thousand dollars for educational reimbursement, others may allocate a full dollar amount to ensure that you get reimbursed for your education as well as your time away. What we’ve done at UCSF is that we have both a centralized fund that is supported through HR, and it’s also policy driven, and then third, we have a strategy where we’ve engaged with external philanthropic organizations, organizations that have been very kind to UCSF and provided added resources to help us scale the work that we’re doing.

So if I were to just paint a quick picture of the evolution of the work we’ve done, when we first started, we had a centralized budget, and of course our policy is written in such a way that anyone that’s in a union has up to about forty hours of work release time that they’re still compensated for. Certainly, depending on your status, if you’re part-time, if you’re more than part-time, if you’re full-time, it is an equivalent in terms of how much time you get to take off to go and pursue an education opportunity. Then for those that are not in the union, it’s a similar process that is already also written into that policy. So that was the first lever that we pulled.

We ensure that we continue to educate managers and leaders in the organization that this is a continued opportunity, and I will say at least ninety percent of our leadership, barring the new folks that just came on that are still learning our processes of course, are fully aware of the opportunities to really engage in the policy-driven time away from work that we’ve really built in.

Then the second piece was under the anchor institution mission as well as HR, we did set aside, and we have consistently set aside, added funds to support direct time away from work, also to support backfill. Because it’s not just pay. I’ll use myself as an example: if I were to go and participate in a program and I’ve left work for a week, that’s forty hours of my time multiplied by whatever I earn per hour, that is replaced by the wages or by the centralized funds that we have. In addition to that, my team may still need my expertise, or someone with my expertise, for that forty hours, whomever that individual is. We also cover that person’s wages for that forty hours to backfill that person.

So in essence, we’re doing two times what the cost is, because we want to make sure that the department still is able to be effective and produce what they need to produce, as well as that the employee does not miss any money in their paycheck the next pay period around.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Let me jump right now to the new Rad Tech program that you’re excited to share with us. You had talked about the EXCEL program, tell us more about this Rad Tech program that you’re launching.

Michael Jones
Absolutely, and I would need to probably zoom out first before I talk about the Rad Tech program itself. When you think about the state of California, we’ve done a tremendous job of really welcoming healthcare clinicians and, I should say, allied health in general. We’ve done a great job as a state ensuring that people see California as a place where they want to work in healthcare, we’ve done a tremendous job there. We’ve also done a tremendous job in supporting our community colleges and the educational facilities that support individuals who want to maybe get an associate’s degree, but not necessarily a bachelor’s, a baccalaureate degree.

The area that the healthcare industry as a whole — I will say across the country but specifically in California, is facing — is that we have an aging population. The population is nearing a point where added services, whether it be tertiary or plenary care, is an increased demand on most healthcare providers in the state. What that means from a very practical level is that if I walked into a facility now and I said I had, maybe, a pain in my shoulder, that requires potentially an MRI, an X-ray, or some form of imaging, that is then added to the capacity of all the imaging devices that we have within the state of California.

Now, if there is a wait list to get access to those imaging opportunities, we could probably see people wait a week or two, two weeks, depending on what the need is, and to wait for something that is potentially life-threatening or life-impacting is not really a good situation. So when we think about where we are as a state, and specifically as a region right now, we are seeing that the demand for imaging services is growing at scales that some of the Bay Area related healthcare systems are probably trying to build capacity to reach before it actually gets there.

So when we decided to launch the radiology program, we decided that it had to do three specific things. The first thing that I wanted it to do was to ensure that it was a pathway from our other pathways into greater economic mobility. I previously mentioned our practice coordinator training program, those are individuals who get trained for about four months and they’re able to start earning an hourly wage of somewhere around thirty to thirty-two bucks an hour.

We then have a secondary stepping stone, which is the medical assistant program. That is a ten to twelve month training program in partnership with a local Bay Area entity, that individuals are then trained, certified in phlebotomy, EKG, and they have an MA certification. They could then move into an MA job paying somewhere around thirty-two to maybe thirty-four dollars an hour. Then the third step, which is right now in our second year of testing this pilot, the third step is our radiology program, which once fully trained, an individual has the opportunity to earn somewhere between one hundred twenty and one hundred forty-four thousand dollars per year.

The reason we’re doing this is because, one, we wanted to ensure that people had opportunities for economic mobility, so going back to those individuals who are below the poverty level or at the poverty level, how do we help them have sequential gains? Secondly, how do we ensure that this strategy is tied directly to the resources necessary to support the aging population as well as the demands that we’re going to be seeing in the next three to five years? So we wanted to build a program that responded to the market, supported people economically in terms of wage gains, and then third and final, it had to be competitive and cost effective enough that we were not going to send people into bankruptcy just because they wanted to gain a new career.

So what we’ve done, and I’ve approved it, is that we’re making this first cohort, and potentially subsequent cohorts, completely free, so there is no tuition being charged to participants that are admitted into the program. We’ve also made it eighteen months. The standard program is between twenty-four months to thirty-six months in the state of California. Because it’s eighteen months, we’ve had the chance to work closely with City College of San Francisco to understand what are the prerequisites that people need to have before they get into the program, what are some of the other pieces of information that we should be teaching in the program that, should you have equivalent experience, you may not necessarily need to go and do again.

So we really looked through the entire curriculum and the delivery of the content to ensure that eighteen months is time effective and that it really meets people where they are, because when you think about an adult, for example, to dedicate two or more years to an educational program is possible, is it optimal for their time and their schedule, that’s debatable. So we wanted to make sure that eighteen months was the benchmark that we set, and we are very happy to have our cohort of eighteen individuals who are going to start in early September in diagnostic medical imaging.

We will then scale our program from diagnostic medical imaging into IR and mammography cross-training, so for those who are employees right now, they’re going to have the opportunity to do cross-training in IR and mammography. Then we’re going to advance to CT by spring of 2027, where we’re going to have a cohort of roughly sixteen or so people going into the CT program, and then by fall of 2027, we’re going to launch our MRI program.

Once again, I said this at the onset, business strategy does not have to be separate from community benefit and altruism. I think they’re one and could be one in the same, where we’re really being, and continuing to be, great neighbors in the city of San Francisco, and also understanding that our patients and their families have certain demands that we need to rise to the occasion to consistently meet now and going forward.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
What a beautiful set of designs that you’ve laid out here. Can I just clarify, Mike? For example, the Rad Tech, have you set it up for internal employees to be able to make those sequences, or are these pre-hire?

Michael Jones
So it’s open. The first cohort for diagnostic medical imaging has been, and was, open to internal incumbents as well as external individuals that are going to be a part of the program. So about twenty-five percent of the incumbent population is individuals who have never been a part of any of our training programs, and they’re from the external environment, not necessarily specific communities, but just outside of UCSF in general.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Talk to us about the learn-and-earn aspects. When do you apply the apprenticeship model, the learn-and-earn model, especially as you’re now incorporating employees, or have you always incorporated employees into your workforce development?

Michael Jones
Absolutely. So with the apprenticeship model…for us, because we have a pretty sizable population of participants in the first cohort that are employees, our goal is to ensure that one, they have at least one wage gain throughout that process, and that is a part of our standard process that we’ve already built in and considered. So a built-in wage gain over the eighteen months that they’re going to be participating with us most likely will occur somewhere around June or July of 2027, in terms of how we are calendaring those wage gains.

For the individuals that are not yet working with us, my team will actively, in the next couple of weeks, start to interview those individuals for opportunities at UCSF so that while they learn, they’re able to earn an income at the same time, and as I mentioned earlier, be able to reimburse any wages lost because they’re participating in a training program with us. At the conclusion of the didactic portion of their learning, which is around thirteen hundred hours or so, we plan to then have those individuals actively participate in hands-on clinical learning while they’re also still being compensated for that added work.

So what we’ve done is taken this generalized employment method, which is get a person a job, get them into the career that they want, and we’ve expanded that and said, well, if we could get somebody hired and we could also get them trained, why can’t we make this an apprenticeship program? Why can’t we have some guarantees built in for these individuals along the way?

So that is what we intend to do, and we are very, very fortunate to have great leadership in the radiology department that has been extremely supportive, and they are helping to design a lot of this work as well. I would be remiss if I didn’t share that GE Healthcare is also a key partner in this process. They are helping us to design the technology that may be necessary for the students to learn the skills that they need, whether it be virtual reality or whether it be some type of simulation that they may need. But GE has been integral in helping us to design the content and the opportunities as well.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So when you talk about providing an employment guarantee at the end to the students who have interviewed and have been selected, when does that take place in the process of the program? I mean, if it’s too early, they’re too raw and may not have the right interview skills yet and don’t look polished, and if it’s too late, maybe it doesn’t position UCSF as strongly as you could. So would you share your lessons learned there?

Michael Jones
Totally, and because we’re a public entity, we do not technically offer guaranteed employment. What we do offer is a guarantee to be reviewed and to be considered for an opportunity. So we consider the relevant time and point where a person is going to be qualified at the highest level…that would be somewhere around year one, I would say closer to the sixteen month mark. The reason I’m putting it there is because at that point they should have completed not only their online learning modules or in-class learning modules, but they would have gained enough clinical experience at that point to be strongly considered for an opportunity at UCSF, given the job requirements that we have for the roles for diagnostic medical imaging.

So we are considering that an individual who starts with us by September of this year, ideally, knock on wood, should be qualified at the utmost level to sit for an interview to be considered by at least November of 2027, at the very latest, based on how we are preparing the curriculum.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
There’s so many ways that we could explore your work. I’m actually curious, what advice would your current self give to your younger version entering workforce development? What are the best practices that work for healthcare specifically?

Michael Jones
Very good question. The first advice that I would give my former younger self is you are not going to be able to reverse things that took decades to do overnight, so be kind to yourself, give yourself grace, it takes time.

The second thing that I would say is the importance of emphasizing that healthcare is a mini-city. If you think about any major city in the United States of America, it has an IT department, it has a facilities team, it has finance and accounting folks, it has everything. My younger self would say, emphasize the importance of allied health in healthcare, because the typical individual that engages with our work may presume that it’s the bedside care or clinical-related work that takes precedent — and those are critical jobs, don’t get me wrong, those are important folks, important jobs, and important roles.

In addition to that, I would say that the other half of the people that make this organization great are the folks that you may never see, the folks that you may never have a chance to interact with directly, because they’re maintaining our HVAC system so that every room in the hospital has the proper temperature that it needs. Because of that, my younger self would hopefully be much more informed about what a career pathway in healthcare really could look like.

I know you’re qualifying this to be specific to healthcare, but I would venture to say that almost any organization in any industry has a unique opportunity right now to consider apprenticeship models, to consider how career pathways help not only to retain and to deepen the engagement of their current staff, but also to be a value proposition and attract new individuals into the organization. I would have told my younger self that a career pathway is a stronger value proposition than a salary offer or than equity that a company can provide, because if people could see that they could grow with an organization, they can make a direct impact…oftentimes you will find that you have your strongest engagement, your strongest retention, in those areas. And retention and engagement go hand in hand when it comes to patient satisfaction, when it comes to reduction in cost for labor. So those are some of the things I would tell my younger self.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
You would be a good mentor to your younger self. I have two more questions. On allied health roles, which you had suggested emphasizing to your younger self, where do you see the puck heading in terms of the evolution of allied health? What can you already see as signals?

Michael Jones
In terms of allied health, I think we’re all staring into the mirror about what’s going on with the proliferation of AI and how it’s advancing in all of our spaces. When it comes to allied health, I see more of our allied health professionals having a skill in that area plus understanding, or deep knowledge, of AI and how it interacts and works in your environment.

One quick example of this is somebody that works in facilities that manages all the waste receptacles. We have Internet of Things. What is it to stop us from saying we have tracking or technology within those waste receptacles that alerts us at any given point about what the volume of waste in that bin is, so that we could deploy technology and deploy team members appropriately to receive or to retrieve that item.

The reason I point that out is because before, it may have been acceptable, which it probably still is in most cases, to have a functional understanding of just the job itself, which is good. But understanding how the job will transform in the next five to ten years with the inclusion of automation or deeper AI technology is going to be critical for allied healthcare. For clinicians, I see that also still being true, but I think in the broader allied healthcare space, we have to become much more comfortable, or at least understanding, of the technology that is spearheading massive change in the workplace.

AI has certainly multiple facets in terms of how it’s viewed, but I think in terms of preparing workers and the workforce for what’s here and what’s coming, being informed is never a bad thing. I mean, you could decide how you want to deploy that knowledge, but I think being informed is one of the things that in allied healthcare, my team and I will consistently and continue to ensure that the people we support are well aware of.

We are currently in the process right now of developing some AI training through one of the latest partnerships that we have that we could deploy to our own team members. Now, we understand that they’re going to be, in some cases, in the UCSF police department working with our public safety folks, or they may be at one of our clinics helping patients check in, but once again, that does not mean you should not have a general understanding, or at least a grasp, of what the technology that is now out there is.

How you choose to deploy it is your own personal will, and I think everyone should consider what the ramifications are in terms of deploying these types of technology, but at the same time, I think it’s critical for allied health practitioners to understand the landscape and how AI can augment, make your work better, or impact your work in any other case going forward.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So Mike, let’s close out by asking you, what makes you optimistic about the future of care?

Michael Jones
That’s a very good question. I am optimistic about the future of care because I believe that a lot of healthcare systems across the country used to operate as monoliths that were standalone and may have not always shared much outside of what was clinically researched or done. However, what I am starting to see a lot more of is concerted efforts with healthcare partners across the region, especially in California where I am, that we’re saying, hey, we have this potential challenge where we need X number of people in this position or this role, we could train a hundred people, but we could only hire eighty, and another healthcare partner is coming in to say, well, we could hire the other twenty, or we could help to train the other twenty to make sure that they could get the opportunities that they need.

For me, that really gives me a lot of excitement, because what that’s telling me is that more and more we are recognizing that healthcare in some spaces is very homogeneous, and what I could teach a medical assistant — barring knowing how my institution operates — what I could teach them fundamentally could be applicable to many other healthcare institutions across the board. I’m very excited to see that healthcare leaders across San Francisco, across the Bay Area, across California are making concerted efforts to ensure that while you may not be the final destination for that individual, that we’re helping to lift the entire economy of the state.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Well, I could not have had a better guest to echo the theme that workforce development, and healthcare workforce development, is a team sport and not an individual sport. I so enjoyed our time together, Mike. Thank you very much for being with us today.

Michael Jones
Likewise, thank you so much, Van. Thank you.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in the nation.