Recruiting for Careers in Laboratory Medicine

(upbeat music) - This is "Lab Medicine Rounds", a curated podcast for physicians, laboratory professionals, and students. I'm your host, Justin Kreuter, a transfusion medicine pathologist and Assistant Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at Mayo Clinic. And today, we're rounding with Jamie Herget. Jamie serves as a placement coordinator within the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology here at Mayo Clinic. Thanks for being here with us today, Jamie.

- Thank you. I'm excited to be here. - Well, we're excited to get your insights on your role as a placement coordinator about how we can kind of recruit people into our laboratory profession. That's quite a challenge I think many people are struggling with . And our audience, physicians, laboratory professionals, and students are all gonna be, I think, smarter after hearing your wisdom. - I certainly hope so. (laughs) - Absolutely.

So, let's kick off with maybe you can underline highlight for us why is recruitment a really an important topic to talk about in 2024? - I think it's always an important topic, but especially as we move into the future and to try to stabilize our workforce. I think that's probably the key. The placement coordinators here in the Department of Laboratory and Medicine and Pathology currently recruit for our clinical lab technologist and medical laboratory science roles.

According to the CDC, approximately 70% of medical decisions depend on the laboratory test results, showing the important role of our clinical laboratories and our clinical laboratory techs and medical laboratory scientists in today's healthcare system. An increase in the population of older adults is expected to lead to greater need for laboratory testing to diagnose different medical conditions.

I was taking a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to prepare for this, and actually they updated it in September of 2023 and projected the MLS and CLT job roles will grow at a rate of 5% through 2032, which is faster than average for all occupations. - Wow, okay, so that really does underline for us it's always a challenge. We can see as we look into the future, there's gonna be more laboratory medicine work being done, and I like your use to the word stabilize.

One of the things I was wondering for our audience listeners, right, there's some of us that I think are pretty savvy to the language you just used about medical laboratory scientists, clinical laboratory technologists, but maybe for our students and maybe clinicians that don't necessarily understand how the black box of pathology works,

can you kind of help us understand what are these roles, what are these people who we're talking about recruiting to laboratory medicine, what do they look like? - Yeah, so specifically medical laboratory science students, they take a lot of biological science and chemistry courses in school and then they either major in medical laboratory science or they take a fifth year, usually it's a fifth year, for a certificate in Medical Laboratory Science where they are trained to do laboratory testing.

And they go through clinical rotations and they are highly sought after candidates across the nation in our healthcare systems. There has been a decline in medical laboratory science programs in recent years, which has led to a more prominence of the role of clinical laboratory technologists.

Now, in Mayo, at Mayo Clinic specifically, a clinical laboratory technologist is someone who has majored and graduated with a bachelor's degree, a minimum of a bachelor's degree in a biological science or chemistry. So, they are trained specifically in the laboratories that they're hired into to perform the laboratory testing that's needed.

- I gotcha, so we're talking about the people that are performing the lab tests in our hospital, like so many TV shows you almost see like the surgeons are performing the tests, (laughs) but the reality, of course, is that that's not the case, we have specialized people that are trained to do this, either you're saying medical laboratory scientists or people that have really specifically trained for laboratory testing, which I think maybe we could probably get into it

a little bit as far as what does that skillset look like. But then also we're talking about clinical laboratory technologists, like people that are doing or they're having a background, have a background in medical science from college and come to work in the lab and get specific training.

Okay, so that really highlights for us who are we talking about, and so I imagine you're probably going and recruiting at colleges and medical laboratory science programs, but I don't know, maybe there's even other places that are great to recruit for our workforce. I'm kind of curious,

can you kind of give us some of your gestalt over what are effective strategies to recruit and what doesn't really seem to work? - Yeah, so it's great that you asked this question because we do actually get to go really across the nation to different colleges and universities, to career fairs, that's probably our primary area that we will work to recruit college students from.

A lot of our workforce is that we are recruiting is coming directly out of college, so graduating with their bachelor's degree and then moving on to the lab. So, in my experience, what works with recruiting someone is really being authentic. I think that's the most important thing. I found that connecting with the audience or that student is very essential. Oftentimes that connection is made by simply telling my story and how I came to be in this career.

I started out as a technologist in a laboratory and worked my way into this placement coordinator role. So, we find a lot of success also in tying our work to our Mayo Clinic values. There are a lot of people that wanna work for an organization like Mayo Clinic.

And talking about our rich ties and how each and every sample that we see is a patient and how important that patient sample is, really people are really interested in and students or prospective employees really want to make a difference. - [Justin] Mm-hmm. - You know, we also speak with a lot of candidates that are on a pre-med track or any other sort of kind of pre-track.

And we find success in letting them know about this career because it really could be a plan B or C because maybe their plan A doesn't work out, but so that they know that they have options, they can still be very impactful in healthcare, they can utilize the degrees that they've received immediately and have a fulfilling or start a fulfilling career.

- Hmm, so that's a great thing to point out 'cause I think that a lot of times people have felt that healthcare, you have physicians and you have nurses and maybe that's where the story ends for a lot of people. Do you think that the pandemic, did that raise awareness of the laboratory and the people performing these tests, or has that not really kind of carried through to put us more on the radar for the general public?

- My opinion is definitely that the pandemic has put medical laboratory science and clinical laboratory technologists on the radar. You know, there was so much talk about the testing for Covid. And when asking about that testing, it was who's completing that? And we were able to really highlight and focus the great work that our laboratory technologists do, not only for Covid testing, but also for all other testing.

I know Jenna Kreitinger, she's the other placement coordinator with me, and we will oftentimes talk about that, you know, do you ever go to the doctor and do you get a swab or do you get a blood draw? Well, what do you think happens to that? You know, just asking that leading question about where do you think that sample goes? What do you think happens? And then that really sparks, they're like, "Oh, I guess I never really thought about it."

And it can lead into a great discussion about the roles that we play and how impactful we are in the healthcare of each patient. - Wow, so for making that initial connection, are there, so you're talking about raising a question is a great way to get people to spark their curiosity and start that conversation.

Are there strategies you've seen over the years that is like, "Ah, this usually strikes out," but that I think a lot of people might be using? - So, I think just handing out brochures, you know, like having a tabletop full of brochures and not connecting and not talking. Sometimes I'll be quite honest, we're at career fairs and it's so busy that I do not have the time to connect with each and every student or person that stops by.

Sometimes they'll come back, which is great because they'll say, "Yeah, I had to wait too long so I had to come back." I love that because I know they're really interested, but we will also leave those events and we'll see like our little postcards on the floor. Now, whether they dropped them on purpose or whether they dropped them accidentally, we don't know for sure, but really having to make those connections.

The pandemic also highlighted or it gave us the option to do things virtually, which did allow us to speak to so many more people, so that has also helped. But being able to still give them resources, so it's maybe a link to a website or even just saying, "Here's my email address," and putting it in the chat, "reach out to me so that we can connect about future opportunities."

So, yeah, - I like that, so you know that I think you're highlighting this connection again because that is the invitation for authenticity, that's in the invitation to discuss values of a medical center. But I guess like you're saying, just giving out pamphlets is not a good surrogate for our ability to recruit in because we're lacking that connection.

I'm curious, so keeping in mind our listeners, so we're having clinicians, we're having laboratory professionals and students, how could each of us in these different groups become better ambassadors for our profession and hopefully kind of amplify the efforts that you're doing? - Yeah, so I mean, I really wanna focus on this shortage of clinical laboratory technologists in medical laboratory science.

So, even as clinicians and physicians talking with others, especially teenagers and younger adults, about what it's like to be in a laboratory or to work in a laboratory. Career awareness is critical in staffing our labs for the future. As I mentioned in my earlier answer, when talking with others, make it personal and make it real. I think that people resonate with that so much more than, again, maybe just a brochure or telling that real life story really helps them connect.

It's a really great way to describe what we do to provide perspective on different career paths and the importance of what we do. Another great way is to foster the idea of how fun science is with children. Now, of course, we're maybe not creating career awareness with children yet, but if they think science is fun, they might really be interested in this role 10, 15 years from now, which is when we're really still gonna probably need to have these people entering our workforce.

Jenna and I participated in an event at the Kasson Mantorville schools last spring where we visited with 4th graders and we had fun scientific experiments and there were several organizations that were present there as well, but to really just highlight how fun science is. And the more we can do of that, I think the better off we'll be in the future. We need to not just focus on the college students of today, we need to focus on the future college students. - Hmm, interesting.

So, so that there is value to highlight for everybody in you're not recruiting them to work the next year or two, but in the school system and to encourage that science is fun, and your CEC value in that, and that people are then going to college maybe pursuing that science degree, setting them up for these opportunities.

- Exactly, and that science career, it might lead to medical laboratory scientists, it might lead to nursing, it might lead to being a physician, but it at least sets them up for that future in science. - You know, and I know having interviewed a lot of people for medical school and also for residency programs, there's a number of people that will maybe start off in medical laboratory science and then go into nursing or medical school as a next career.

So, there's neat opportunities, I think that certainly kind of provides a unique perspective for those future nurses and physicians. I imagine that so as we're talking in 2024, I imagine that new tools may be opening up for kind of new opportunities in recruitment. Again, you're highlighting this idea of connection and I'm kinda curious,

are there anything that you're kind of excited to try out in the coming months? - Well, I wish I could say that there is. To my knowledge, we don't have any new tools per se at our fingertips, but we are excited about making our information more accessible by utilizing QR codes. So, definitely not a new tool by any means, but a really a newer tool for us with recruitment and using less paper, so it's a win-win there.

I mentioned earlier that the pandemic opened up a lot of virtual recruitment opportunities. So, we continue to use those to spread the word about this career choice and about Mayo Clinic across the nation, which is great. We also work closely with our human resources partners to closely identify schools and areas we should focus on.

We're really excited about our collaboration with the Office of Academic Partnerships here at Mayo Clinic, which allows us to partner and recruit at historically Black colleges and universities as well as a work study partnership that we now have with the University of Minnesota Rochester. Another thing that really is gonna play a larger role in 2024 is social media. You know, that's been around for a while, but we continue to use things like LinkedIn. Indeed, Handshake, TikTok is gonna be new.

So, there's definitely, you're gonna see Mayo Clinic out there on TikTok a little bit more. So, I think that those are creative resources that can bring this information to the public. - Wow, you know, well you mentioned QR codes and such, I just recently heard a innovative medical educator talk and talk about how they use QR codes. So, I think some of these technologies that we're getting our hands around, there's novel ways that we can use them.

I'm kind of curious, so for our listeners, if they are reaching out and providing their story or getting people curious, maybe clinicians that are kind of if they hear somebody interested in medical school to if they want to help them understand other careers in healthcare so that people can understand what are their opportunities, is there like a professional website that you generally send people to that you kind of advise and say, "If somebody's interested in a career in laboratory medicine,

what would be a great resource to give them?" - Well, unfortunately, I don't really have a great resource to give them. I always direct them to our Mayo Clinic website because that's where we want them to go. You know, we do have a clinical laboratories landing page on our external career website, www.jobsatmayoclinic.org or I'm not 100% sure on if I said that correctly, but that's usually where I direct them.

We also have a Medical Laboratory Science program through the Mayo Clinic School of Health Sciences. I think that would be a great way to learn a little bit more about that medical laboratory profession and what that schooling might look like. - Hmm, great, great. And then, any final thoughts on words of advice for people that are trying to make those initial connections and share the story of what's it like to work in a lab? - Be authentic. Don't sugarcoat it.

I mean, I think that being honest that it maybe isn't always glamorous, but at the end of the day, if you want to help a patient, then this is a great career to be in, especially if you don't wanna be patient facing. You know, we do a lot of great work behind the scenes, for lack of a better way to say it. We still play a vital role, we just don't necessarily get to see that patient face-to-face. - Wow, we've been rounding with the very authentic Jamie Herget.

Thanks for being with us here today. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - And to all of our listeners, thank you for joining us. We invite you to share your thoughts and suggestions by email to [email protected]. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe. Until our next rounds together, we encourage you to continue to connect lab medicine and the clinical practice through educational conversations. (upbeat music continues)