How an Innovative Apprenticeship Model Is Solving for Labor Shortages

As nursing shortages reach critical levels nationwide, healthcare leaders seek innovative workforce development strategies beyond traditional recruitment. Georgia-based Wellstar Health System, a non-profit healthcare system with a workforce of 30,000 people and a revenue of 8 billion, implemented a new apprenticeship model to address staffing challenges. The method guarantees job placement and treats apprenticeships as strategic investments rather than expenses. Wellstar's solution includes fully funded "Career Care" with wraparound support (including childcare and technology), structured three-year career pathways with automatic advancement at 18 months, and training aligned with critical revenue-generating roles like nursing and imaging.

Career development platform Guild partnered with Wellstar on its education and skilling initiatives. The initiative is approaching its one-year anniversary, and almost 800 people have graduated or enrolled.

Healthcare Innovation recently spoke with Laura Dannels, Wellstar's chief talent officer, to learn more about their new apprenticeship model.

Could you tell me about your organization?

Wellstar is one of the most integrated and largest systems in the Southeast. We’re Marietta-based, but we serve all of Georgia and are expanding into South Carolina. Georgia is 49th in the country in terms of healthcare workforce availability, and we're almost dead last in terms of having the workforce meet the needs, which impacts the healthcare of all Georgians and folks in the Greater Atlanta area.

Could you talk about the staffing challenges in Georgia?

Sixty percent of the rural counties of Georgia are considered medically underserved today. We have a huge shortage in Georgia. Even today, the state of Georgia is turning down about 3000 qualified nursing students per year. There are some bandwidth issues. There's a faculty shortage, and then there's a preceptor shortage and availability. We’re working with the whole academic system of Georgia to help double enrollments at key nursing and allied health programs. But even so, we have such a long way to go. We also lose more nurses. Interestingly, more nurses leave Atlanta than most states. About 70 to 80 percent of nurses typically stay in the state where they attend school. We’re losing about 30 to 35 percent of them here in Atlanta. In states like California or Washington, the nursing pay is substantially better. Georgia is one of the lowest-paying states for some of these roles. We have about five big systems fighting over talent here.

Can you tell me more about the new apprenticeship model?

In order for us to have a margin as an organization, we have to have the right workforce. We don't think about apprenticeships or workforce development as a nice-to-have employee perk. We can't recruit our way out of the problem. It started with identifying our highest revenue-generating roles. Our program is built around the most important, critical clinical roles for the future. We have roles that are aligned with our greatest business needs. We will pay for everything from the certifications to the full degree programs. We have a new partnership with Microsoft; they've given us a $75,000 grant to build our AI pathway.

We believe that if we're going to invest in our people, we want to guarantee wage growth and placement. In most workforce development programs, they still have to interview after the program. We made guaranteed placement a core part of this, as well as wage growth. We show folks transparently what will happen to their wages as they go along. We've got about 15 to 20 pathways now. The nice thing about Guild is that it now allows us to use all of our local universities and our local partners, as well as national ones, but we can scale in just a couple of weeks. From a workforce planning perspective, we can say: I'm starting to see gaps, or we're building a new hospital, I will need this many roles. Then we can immediately scale and launch programs within weeks. That's, I think, what the big differentiator is; our partnership with Guild, and what makes it special. We believe wholeheartedly in the full wraparound support, everything from childcare to computers and WIFI. We've looked into Uber credits for people who need Uber. Our premise has been to start with the lowest-paid workers in our organization. We’re developing them for the highest priority roles in our organization.

We didn't want to limit supply and demand, so we built an agile float pool. We’ve mapped all that upskilling to different roles, and we'll use them, even if they're going to school to be nurses, but they won't be ready for two years. We catalog their skills and can redeploy them to meet urgent business needs based on their skills. If you look at our entry-level roles, we've got almost 1000 people enrolled and/or placed from this program, and we haven't even been around for a year. There's a lot of movement among our lowest-paid wage earners.

The partnership and funding are so important in this work. What's going to allow us to scale this even further and faster is through partnerships to get funding.

We've also opened up that apprenticeship pay-to-train model. We're doing pay-to-train in two different ways: one with our employees, who work their current job in the more didactic classroom learning, and then, if we get to hands-on, we pay them for the rest of the training. We also pay for the hands-on training for the external community, which is really where we want to go big. Next, we hire and we pay them a training wage the whole time they go through the programs.

The next thing we want to do is start targeting some of the most vulnerable communities in our footprint, in Greater Atlanta and Georgia. Then do the pay-to-train but with vulnerable populations, because it's the epitome of our mission of enhancing the health and well-being of every person we serve.

Do students commit to a contract?

It depends on the length of the program. If they're a low-wage earner….they don't have an agreement. If we pay for their full bachelor's degree, we would ask for a two-year commitment.

We've had so many team members in tears that we're removing all these barriers and guaranteeing their place. We've had folks working in janitorial service for 20-30 years who now have an opportunity because we're removing every barrier that exists and guaranteeing their placement.

What makes this program different from other programs?

It's the ability to scale quickly. I think wraparound support and having it tied to the highest revenue-generating roles and or business needs. Companies are investing so much without guaranteeing placement. The big difference is that the second students finish the program, they move into a guaranteed wage.

The third thing is this agile float pool…where we can redeploy talent while we're waiting to place them.

It's really combining re-skilling with reimagining what the work looks like. Because we have this skills-based float pool, it's forced us to now consider reimagining the care model.

Could you talk about partnerships with education systems?

We work with technical schools, certification programs, and colleges, all of our local partners here in the state of Georgia, as well as their partnership with Guild all across the country. We started in high school, where we pay and fund healthcare pathways for high school students, and we guarantee them an offer into WellStar.

What have been some of the challenges?

It's a big shift in mindset for our hiring leaders. Healthcare workers are already burnt out, and now we're asking them to spend more time upskilling, training, and onboarding people. I think that will continue to be a big challenge.

The second big challenge is getting the right preceptor models. We have a capacity issue. The preceptor and the applied learning piece are really where the rubber meets the road.

The last piece is the vetting to ensure we have the right people at the front end. Not everyone is successful.

What do you anticipate for the coming years?

We want to expand this to over 100 pathways within five years. We want them to be open to the entire community, not just our team members. That's going to require a lot of funding. And so our biggest bucket, I'd say, over the next 18 months, is going to be working through national state grants as well as getting this message out to big donors.

I believe that 91 percent of our enrollees in the program are identified as a person of color and/or female. It's just about expanding and making those apprenticeships available in the community. The amount of community response and people trying to get into WellStar has been substantial. We'll do everything from helping them get a GED to English as a second language.