Promising Practice #3

Employing Sector Strategies

Overview

The Boston Private Industry Council (PIC) has operated multiple health sector programs that together provide a comprehensive array of services for workers and employers including accessible career ladders that lead to self-sufficiency. The cornerstone of the PIC has been engaging the health care employers to invest in the development of the lower-skilled employees while leveraging private resources to support specific health care training and employee development. The Council has used federal and state grants to pilot a continuum of services including career coaching, college classes at the worksite, loan forgiveness programs and scholarships to support workers who are preparing for demand occupations in the health care sector. Three recent programs are the:

Radiologic Technologist Program
Pharmacy Technician Program
Nursing Career Ladders Initiative

The initiatives were designed to create accessible career ladders that would allow workers to prepare for high-demand occupations health care occupations that pay self-sufficiency wages. At the same time, the initiatives successfully address the needs of health care employers. The program highlights are listed below.

Radiologic Technologist Program

The PIC launched the Radiologic Technologist Program with a large consortium of area health care employers – Partners Healthcare System (the system includes primary care and specialty physicians, community hospitals, the two founding academic medical centers, specialty facilities, community health centers, and other health-related entities) who needed to fill radiologic technologist positions. Together these two entities developed outreach programs and loans to encourage unemployed workers and individuals working elsewhere in healthcare to become technologists.

The centerpiece of the Radiologic Technologist Program is the loan forgiveness program. Those enrolled are provided opportunities for a standard scholarship program. The format for the program is in place with a uniform set of policies and procedures for use by all partner member institutions. This scholarship is essentially a forgivable loan for those students who successfully complete their education, obtain a degree in medical imaging, and work a certain amount of time in one of the Partners institutions. The PIC and Partners also collaborated on the development of a medical imaging career information website - www.radiologycareersma.org - that provides career changers, career counselors and high school students with information about medical imaging careers.

Pharmacy Technician Program

The PIC collaborated with four hospitals and two community colleges on a Pharmacy Technician Program. The Pharmacy Technician Program is designed to engage incumbent pharmacy technicians in increasing their skills and gaining credentials in exchange for wage increases. It also enables hospital human resource departments to re-shape career pathways and meet the requirements of a new state regulation for hiring certified pharmacy technicians.

A key component of the Pharmacy Technician Program is that participating hospitals had to agree to raise participants' hourly wages generally to $15 or more if they took and passed all five courses and the national certification exam. Prior to enrolling students, the hospitals had to submit in writing a plan for how wages would be raised. While one hospital opted out due to this requirement, most found unexpected benefits in the increased wages for workers. The wage target helped to raise the level of skills and professionalism in the hospitals' pharmacy departments. For employees who participated in the program, the wage target was a powerful motivation to take the classes, to study and to pass the exam.

Nursing

The PIC led a regional Nursing Care Career Ladder Initiative (NCLI) with hospitals, health centers, colleges, and community -based organizations. The Initiative was developed in response to the nursing shortage in Massachusetts with the goal of rebuilding and reinvigorating the nursing workforce pipeline. The Boston project was part of a statewide initiative that was led by the Commonwealth Corporation (a quasi-public institution). Through the NCLI, the PIC developed and delivered nurse career coaching services for entry level employees of 5 health care institutions and for high school students, established a pilot Registered Nurse (RN) scholarship/forgivable loan pool program for employees of community health centers, piloted credential recognition coaching services for foreign trained nurses, conducted an inventory of metropolitan Boston nurse preparation programs, published a guide to financial support resources for nursing students, and conducted training and published a guide for employers and immigrant-serving organizations on the credential recognition process for foreign trained nurses.

Coaching and college and career planning are an essential element of the NCLI. The target participants are entry-level workers in the health care industry who want to advance and/or make a career change and hose new to the workforce graduating from high school.
The "Nursing Loan Pool" was a loan forgiveness program adapted from the PIC’s Radiologic Technologist model. The loan covers tuition, fees, books and other expenses incurred while enrolled in an accredited associate degree or bachelor degree nursing program. The maximum loan amount is $3,000 per year based on successful completion of course work per semester. The Loan Pool was administered centrally through the office of The Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. For the loan to be completely forgiven the participant must remain employed at a community health center for a specified period of time.

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Partners and Funding

The PIC used a United States Department of Labor (USDOL) Incumbent/Dislocated Worker Skills Shortages grant to launch the Pharmacy Technician and Radiologic Technologist programs.

The Radiologic Technologist loan forgiveness program began with grant funds. After proving successful and valuable to employers, the employers agreed to continue funding the program. The employers developed a "self-taxation" scheme whereby each institution contributes on a pay-as-you-hire basis. Employers reimburse the entire scholarship, plus administrative costs.

NCLI was funded through H1-B training grants from the USDOL. The Commonwealth Corporation was the actual recipient of the $2.9 million dollar grant, and the PIC partnered with the Commonwealth Corporation in the development of the program.

The PIC leveraged private resources to support essential health care training and employee development and engaged health care employers to invest in their lower-skilled employees. These added resources are the key to the long-term stability of the PIC's health care sector initiatives.

Challenges

One of the most significant challenges was trying to leverage employer resources, and motivate employers to the point where they were willing to pay for the PIC's services. Persistence and demonstration that the services and results are worth the expenditure was essential to addressing this challenge.

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Keys to Successful Implementation

A strong and strategic board gave the PIC the clout and experience it needed to test approaches, gain experience, and to bring new employers into the system. Employer board members have been the PIC’s most demanding customers and its best salespeople.
The Boston PIC is a privately incorporated, 501(c) (3) non-profit organization. As a private organization with a public-sector mandate, the PIC can tap a variety of local, state, federal, and philanthropic funds and can combine those to support projects. This broad, relatively stable funding base was essential to the success of the PIC’s health care sector initiatives.
A process of enabling each potential partner to articulate their needs, interests, capacities and constraints fostered the ability to document stakeholder interests and capacities. It also helped to identify overall project goals, program design, reasonable objectives and how to measure them.

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