By - February 04, 2025
Most laboratory professionals find their work energizing, intellectually stimulating, and rewarding. Despite this level of personal fulfillment, educating potential recruits about medical laboratory professions can be challenging. This is especially true since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit laboratories hard.
To find out more about the various ways people enter the field of laboratory medicine and climb through the ranks, the University of Washington Center for Health Workforce Studies (UW CHWS) collaborated with the American Society of Clinical Pathology (ASCP) on a ground-breaking survey of laboratory professionals. This UW CHWS-led study, Career Pathways into the Medical Laboratory Workforce: Education, Exposures, and Motivations, followed up on findings from ASCP’s highly informative 2021 study, The Clinical Laboratory Workforce: Understanding the Challenges to Meeting Current and Future Needs and the Blueprint for Action.
The medical laboratory workforce is a critical component of a high functioning, efficiently run healthcare system. Laboratory professionals serve on the front lines of healthcare, by providing information that helps to prevent, diagnose, and treat illness and disease. Laboratory professionals are also uniquely poised to spot concerning healthcare trends within communities and age groups. Without enough people filling laboratory positions, the quality of health in our communities suffers.
Currently there are fewer accredited laboratory training programs that there once were. Lack of training and rotation sites lead to less graduates to fill high vacancies in the laboratory.
It’s widely understood that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated early retirements and emptied labs of seasoned workers. When coupled with current, too-low rates of new professionals entering the field, a potential crisis of a different kind may be looming. The repercussions of understaffed laboratories include fatigue and burnout of workers, as well as severely long wait times for test results and treatment.
To combat these trends, data are needed that shed light on recruitment, retention, and job satisfaction within the lab. Recommendations from ASCP’s Blueprint for Action included next step concepts, such as improving visibility of clinical and laboratory occupations within the school system, and the need to focus on inclusion and diversity. “Laboratory professionals often talk about how they got into the lab. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about the various pathways that exist. But we needed more. What we were looking for was clear, concrete data about how professionals become exposed to these professions, and why they feel driven to pursue them,” explains Edna C. Garcia. MPH, Senior Director of Scientific Engagement and Research for ASCP’s Institute for Science, Technology, and Policy.
“Through our collaborative work on a 2021 study with ASCP, entitled The Clinical Laboratory Workforce: Understanding the Challenges to Meeting Current and Future Needs, we identified a number of challenges and barriers to recruitment and retention of laboratory personnel. This early work suggested that people were not seeing these jobs clearly, and were also not finding career pathways for jobs in laboratory settings,” says Bianca K. Frogner, PhD, Professor, Department of Family Medicine and Director, Center for Health Workforce Studies, School of Medicine, University of Washington.
“To learn more, we conducted this study through our Health Workforce Research Center on Allied Health funded by Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) that let us dig deeper. This enabled us to better understand the career pathways that exist across multiple clinical lab jobs,” she adds. “The result was our most recent collaborative effort: the Career Pathways into the Medical Laboratory Workforce: Education, Exposures, and Motivations survey.”
The overarching goal of the online, anonymous survey was the investigation of career pathways into the medical laboratory workforce. The study’s participants, garnered from ASCP’s database, included over 1,000 individuals working across six laboratory professions:
· Medical laboratory scientists (MLSs)
· Medical laboratory technicians (MLTs)
· Histotechnologists (HTLs)
· Histotechnicians (HTs)
· Cytologists (CTs)
· Phlebotomists (PBTs)
The survey generated a wealth of useful data. Key findings include:
The study’s findings indicated that there are multiple, varying career pathways across laboratory occupations, as well as a diverse range of educational backgrounds amongst professionals. “Anecdotal evidence and data from our 2021 collaborative study with ASCP indicated that there are many entry points into the clinical lab. This survey confirmed these anecdotal findings,” says Grace Guenther, MPA, Research Scientist, Center for Health Workforce Studies, School of Medicine, University of Washington.
“One common theme kept repeating itself – many laboratory workers are first exposed to the field through friends and family who are employed within laboratory or other types of healthcare settings, like nursing, adds Ms. Garcia. In fact, around half of the study’s participants noted that friends or family members generated their initial exposure to laboratory work.
“There’s not enough exposure to laboratory jobs amongst the general public. Yes, there’s a perception that there’s someone back there doing good work with test tubes, but the actual work, and worker, is unseen,” says Susan M. Skillman, MS, Senior Deputy Director of the University of Washington Center for Health Workforce Studies. “People know about doctors, nurses, and dentists. But they don’t have much identification with clinical laboratory professionals,” she adds.
People who entered laboratory professions that require a two- or four-year degree often had their initial exposure to the field from a college or career counselor. “It’s not always a specific clinical laboratory degree that gets people into these jobs, however,” says Dr. Frogner. She mentions that some people who earn a bachelor’s degree in biology or biochemistry go into laboratory careers after getting on-the-job training within a laboratory setting.
Ms. Skillman stresses the wide range of training and skill sets of laboratory professions “There are common threads across professions, but certain jobs, like phlebotomist, have a relatively short training trajectory versus medical laboratory technologists, which requires a college degree,” she says.
Given the wide range of preparation needed across lab occupations “A tailored approach to recruitment and worker retention is key,” adds Dr. Frogner.
Even though college and career counselors were helpful for providing input about laboratory careers based on findings from the study, enhanced outreach to these professionals may be a powerful way to improve laboratory recruitment.
The clinical laboratory workforce is sometimes perceived, even by healthcare professionals and those in the C-Suite, as being one cohesive group. This is, of course, not the case. The heterogeneity of laboratory jobs is compounded by a lack of alignment of job titles across settings. This inconsistency has hindered job visibility and therefore, recruitment. It may also affect retention, since laboratory professionals don’t always have a clear sense of the pathways for advancement.
“Aligning job titles across clinical settings and throughout organizations like the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as in accrediting bodies is an ASCP priority, and work that we’ve been actively engaged in,” mentions Ms. Garcia.
“There are so many job titles that it’s hard to know what each job entails. This may be why word of mouth is such a powerful pathway conduit,” says Dr. Frogner. It may also be why career counselors and out-of-industry mentors have a hard time explaining these jobs to potential candidates. “These jobs are not widely known outside of the field,” adds Ms. Skillman.
One of the survey’s most powerful takeaways was the high level of job satisfaction noted by study participants.
“Study subjects were very favorable, for the most part, about their occupations. You don’t get that high of a level of response from many other healthcare professional groups, such as oral health professionals or nurses,” says Ms. Skillman.
“People had a generally favorable response to questions about job satisfaction across clinical laboratory occupations. They also mentioned that they would recommend their career to others,” adds Ms. Guenther.
Like many professions, laboratory career pathways are multifaceted, and rarely occur in straight lines. There are many job titles, and ways to climb the laboratory professional ladder. Findings from this study make clear the need for increased exposure to the field at the educational level, as well as at the community level. It also makes clear that consistency across job descriptions and titles can help forge access to entry points and career pathways.
These changes require an “all hands on deck” approach, but will pay off significantly in areas like recruitment, retention, and advocacy. These changes will also provide access to highly rewarding careers for people who, in turn, will help keep our communities, neighborhoods, and country healthier and safer.
Career Pathways into the Medical Laboratory Workforce: Education, Exposures, and Motivations was in part supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of an award totaling $608,211 with zero percentage financed with non-governmental sources. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by HRSA, HHS or the U.S. Government.
Patient Advocate and Freelance Writer