How Healthcare Can Prepare Their Workforces for the Age of AI

AI is set to transform every single industry. The skills for all of our jobs are expected to change 68% by 2030, with the pace of change accelerated by the rapid advances we’ve seen in this world-changing technology. 

There are few places where the AI opportunity is more clear than in Healthcare. This is an industry where the skills for jobs have already changed 28% since 2015, as nearly all healthcare workers have had to become tech workers this past decade just to keep up. This is an industry that is hiring some of the most in-demand and fastest-growing roles on LinkedIn today. And this is an industry where we’re starting to see leading companies like Johnson & Johnson and Amazon show what’s possible when you put AI in the hands of your researchers, or AI in the hands of your doctors.

Healthcare can lead the way in showing us all how our teams and our organizations can embrace AI to transform how work gets done. Because what’s becoming clearer by the day is that AI will not only speed up the pace of world-changing discoveries in science and medicine. It will also reshape the everyday work of Healthcare professionals in ways that will allow them to focus on the things they actually want to spend more time doing – like spending more time understanding patient needs, or collaborating with a team on new research. Those are all things based on people skills that only us as humans can do – skills AI will amplify but never replace. 

As the industry enters this historic moment of technological change, I wanted to share a few key trends we’re seeing in Healthcare on LinkedIn today, and offer some ways companies and their teams can stay a step ahead.

Healthcare has been a hiring hot spot on LinkedIn

A recent report from Greg Lewis shows Healthcare roles make up 6 of the top 10 jobs with the fastest-growing demand globally. Employers can’t seem to hire this talent fast enough, and especially for frontline roles like nurses, we’ve seen nearly double the number of jobs posted compared to two years ago. In fact, today two nurses apply for a job every minute in the U.S. on LinkedIn. As AI changes team and talent needs and creates new job categories that didn’t exist before, this hiring surge is likely to continue.

Healthcare employers need to work hard to win over this talent

While Healthcare talent is in high demand, it’s increasingly challenging to attract and keep this group. Hiring activity for Healthcare in the U.S. has steadily been above average, but professionals in this industry are also more likely to leave jobs within less than a year according to a January analysis of LinkedIn’s short tenure rate by Murat Erer (our measure of people quitting within less than a year). 

This will come as no shock to anyone in this field today. With rates of burnout and turnover spiking during the pandemic, this is an industry still working hard to bring new energy to how they approach employer branding to offer a more compelling case for why people should join and stay. And they’re not alone in this challenge: 85% of people say they are considering a job change this year – so retention is front and center for nearly all companies in 2024.

Healthcare needs to embrace the role of educator to keep pace with AI

The number one retention strategy for most companies is providing learning opportunities. But in the age of AI, learning is much more than a retention tactic – it’s about business agility and equipping your teams with the necessary new skills your organization urgently needs to stay competitive. 

It's more likely than not that your employees are already curious about AI and are exploring new tools on their own. We just launched our latest Workplace Learning Report which shows four out of five people want to learn how to use AI in their job. But Healthcare companies are still lagging behind in meeting people where they are at – with only 12% of Learning & Development teams planning to offer training in generative AI tools.

What you learned in medical school or in your onboarding training is no longer enough to set you up for your entire career given how fast technology is evolving. It’s on Healthcare employers to step up and provide teams the opportunities to learn how to adapt to AI in ways that will set your teams and your business up for success.

LinkedIn is helping Healthcare adapt

Professionals on LinkedIn are highly interested in learning about AI and Healthcare is no exception. Jamila Smith-Dell and our Insights team took a closer look at which AI courses Healthcare professionals spent the most time learning last year, and we’re sharing them below free and unlocked through July 1 for anyone in the field to start brushing up on these new essential skills.

Most Popular AI Courses for Healthcare Professionals:

• (1) What Is Generative AI? 

• (2) Prompt Engineering: How to Talk to the AIs 

• (3) Introduction to Prompt Engineering for Generative AI 

• (4) GPT-4: The New GPT Release and What You Need to Know 

• (5) GPT-4 Foundations: Building AI-Powered Apps 

• Bonus Course: Hands-on Data Science and AI for Healthcare 

And to keep up with all the interest in nursing roles especially (over half a million nursing professionals in the U.S. have turned on Open to Work!), we’ve also recently launched new tools to help nurses find the right roles with features like customized job search filters to fine-tune your search with speciality and preferred shift, and enhanced ways to showcase your skills and credentials on your Profile.

AI is already reshaping Healthcare jobs, whether companies are reshaping talent plans or not 

It’s early, but we already are seeing the impacts on Healthcare jobs on our platform today, with the top U.S. roles requiring AI skills spanning a wide range of technical roles from engineers to data and analytics professionals:

And we’re starting to see the tangible gains at work for professionals who use AI tools to focus more on the best part of their jobs – the “people part”. Microsoft’s DAX Copilot – a new generative AI tool specifically for healthcare organizations – is a great example. Already, those using DAX say they are getting valuable minutes back in every encounter and are freed up to see more patients every week. These kinds of tools at scale can allow professionals in the field to focus their energy where it matters most. 

As people skills come to the center of work, Healthcare professionals will emerge as among the most resilient 

The good news for healthcare professionals amidst all this change? Healthcare roles are among the least likely to see major job disruption from AI out of all 18 industries LinkedIn researchers looked at. This is mainly due to the high concentration of people-to-people skills required that technology can amplify but can’t replace – especially true for clinical roles where doctors and nurses have to bring just as much empathy to the job as they do medical expertise. 

Follow along, as I’m headed to SXSW this weekend to unpack this topic further with leading experts like Jim Swanson , Sunita Mishra MD, MBA, and Claudia Lucchinetti. And for the Healthcare pros out there - I’d love to hear more in the comments on ways your teams are already using AI at work! 

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*Methodology: This analysis produces a list of the most popular AI/GAI courses on LinkedIn Learning taken by active learners in the Hospitals and Healthcare industry. The timeframe of the analysis is a rolling 12 months. When run in February 2024, the dates were February 2023 - January 2024.