Compass Staff |
The following is a recap of the Guild webinar, “The Future of Frontline Talent: Credentialing, Career Pathways, and Mobility at Scale,” which is available on-demand here.
Erin Pearson will be the first to tell you that in healthcare and other credential-heavy industries, the roles most critical to an organization’s mission are often the hardest to staff — and also the hardest to rebuild once pipelines break down.
“We realized that by the time we could see the talent gap clearly, the chance to be proactive was already gone,” said Pearson, a talent outreach strategist at Children’s Nebraska, a nonprofit regional pediatric specialty healthcare system and hospital based in Omaha. “We had to rethink how we were planning — not just for today, but for one year, three years, and five years out.”
For Children’s Nebraska, this reality sharpened the focus on its existing workforce.
From buying to building
Like many regional healthcare providers, Children’s Nebraska is experiencing severe staffing shortages in roles that require either licensure or certification: roles like medical assistants, respiratory therapists, surgical technologists, and medical lab scientists. When confronted with similar staffing challenges in the past, Pearson and her team resorted to “recruiting harder” from the job market. But in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, that is no longer a viable option.
“We’re fortunate to have an incredible pool of talent within our walls,” Pearson said. “The work is about creating visibility and access for those team members — and asking, ‘How can we help people grow into what they ultimately want to achieve?’”
Pearson and her team got to work developing what she calls a “build talent” strategy centered on the most at-risk frontline roles. Their first experiment focused on medical assistants, a high-volume, high-turnover role critical to clinical operations and patient care. The pilot proved successful almost immediately. Within a year, eight additional departments wanted to launch their own internal career pathways.
“It was a great problem to have,” Pearson said. “But the manual work required to manage all of it nearly overwhelmed our team.”
When spreadsheets become the bottleneck
As Kathi Enderes, senior vice president of research and global industry analyst at the Josh Bersin Company, shared, what resonates with leaders — especially in healthcare, manufacturing, and other credential-heavy industries — is a “systemic approach” built around four “Rs”: recruiting, retaining, reskilling, and redesigning work. But she notes that while this framework helps clarify what needs to happen, translating it into day-to-day execution requires new levels of coordination, visibility, and control, particularly in healthcare organizations managing complex credential pathways at scale.
That challenge is where Mat Frenz enters the story. Frenz, who leads design on Guild’s product expansion team, has spent years studying how talent leaders manage credential pipelines. A common theme emerged from this work: spreadsheets.
“The pain point people name is spreadsheets,” Frenz said. “But the real problem isn’t the spreadsheet itself; it’s everything it takes to get data into and out of it.”
As Frenz explained, in credential-heavy roles, workforce planning depends on coordination among employers, educators, and regulators, each operating with different timelines, requirements, and data systems. Without shared visibility, HR teams become de facto project managers, manually tracking enrollments, licensure steps, and placements in hopes that no one slips through the cracks.
This was the exact problem facing Pearson at Children’s Nebraska. Pearson’s team was coordinating their talent-development strategy across dozens of stakeholders in real time. Data had to be gathered manually through emails, texts, and invoices, among other inputs, and then translated into information that leaders and senior leadership could actually use.
What Children’s Nebraska needed was a system to help design role- and region-specific cohorts, guide learners end-to-end from enrollment to licensure, and give administrators, such as Pearson’s team, real-time visibility into progress and projected readiness.
From fragmentation to cohesion
As Frenz and Pearson worked together, a key insight emerged: The needs of learners and employers were more aligned than they appeared.
“Learners want to know three things,” Frenz explained. “Where am I on the journey? What do I need to do next? And when am I expected to hit key milestones?”
Employers like Children’s Nebraska want that same visibility so they can plan staffing, manage role placements, and intervene early when an employee learner is at risk of falling behind or dropping out entirely.
The big shift Children’s Nebraska made was from simply offering access to education to actively managing the learning journey end to end — from initial interest, to enrollment, to licensure, to placement. The team mapped pathways role by role, defined milestones upfront, and structured support around the moments where learners most often struggle: enrollment hurdles, licensure requirements, clinical placements, and conflicts between work, school, and family responsibilities.
“These are adult learners,” Pearson said. “They’re working, they have families, and life doesn’t stop just because they’re in school. What changed is that they no longer feel alone when challenges come up … and we can intervene early.”
One example is Juan, who joined Children’s Nebraska as a patient-access specialist and was the first cohort in the new medical-assistant pathway. He completed his learning program, moved into a medical assistant role, and later advanced again within the same clinic.
“Because we’ve built the pathway, we’re already developing the next cohort behind him,” Pearson said.
Measuring what matters
For Pearson, demonstrating a return on her investment meant translating individual success stories into outcomes that her organization’s leaders and donors can trust. The personal impact on team members matters deeply, she stressed, but sustaining investment requires showing how those stories translate into measurable results and the broader mission of Children’s Nebraska.
“If you want to convince executives this is worth their while, you have to show the metrics that matter—retention, internal placement into licensed roles, and reductions in agency labor costs,” said Anderes. “That’s where the real ROI shows up.”
Over time, that data has become clear for Children’s Nebraska. Employees who participate in the career pathway programs stay with the organization at rates more than four percentage points higher than those who don’t, and the programs have seen a 17% increase in participation among people of color in licensed roles. In an industry where even single-point gains in retention can translate into meaningful reductions in vacancy rates, agency labor costs, and downstream patient-care disruptions, those improvements carry real financial and operational weight. As analysts at the Josh Bersin Company have noted, organizations that invest in structured frontline career pathways consistently outperform peers on retention, internal mobility, and productivity, which directly correlate to lower labor costs and higher organizational stability.
For Children’s Nebraska, those results have helped build confidence not only among executive leaders, but also among donors, who fund nearly all of the organization’s sponsored programs and increasingly expect to see clear evidence that workforce investments advance both mission delivery and long-term sustainability.
A model for frontline-first talent strategy
What’s happening at Children’s Nebraska is not unique to healthcare. Every industry with credentialed frontline roles faces similar constraints and similar opportunities. The lesson is that with intentional design, visibility, and coordination, workforce development can become an organization’s strategic capability.
As Pearson put it, when you stop leaving things to chance, you can actually build the future workforce you need before the gap becomes a crisis.
