Crossing organization boundaries: Innovative strategies to develop career paths for frontline health care workers

Current efforts to advance the skills and careers of entry level or front line health employees are hampered by two problems. First, employees experience difficulty leaving jobs and families to gain required education. Second, employers lose work productivity when employees must miss work to gain additional education. A promising approach to address these challenges is Accredited Work-Based Learning (AWBL) which involves partnerships between health care employer organizations and educational institutions. The approach uses creative work-based learning strategies to achieve standardized and individual learning objectives that meet both employer needs and academic requirements of the educational institution. The process requires and facilitates system changes in both the employer and educational settings resulting in improved career skills and increase retention in frontline health care workers. Systems changes include offering college credit for work-based learning and working with employers to reward employees for improving both workplace and academic competencies. More specifically, we will describe how common organizational practice can be modified to allow non-traditional approaches to career advancement. Additionally, we will describe a new AWBL program that is one of the first to be implemented in rural areas of the United States and signals a promising new direction for health care as well as for educational programs serving health care organizations. We present a new form of administering health organizations that enables entry-level workers to grow within and for the organization and addresses a common health administration challenge.