Amid job search and transformational growth, UMass Chan seeks to create the perfect structure

Photos | Courtesy of UMass Chan Medical SchooL To recruit for its 600 open positions, UMass Chan Medical School hosted a career fair in March, which was attended by 230 individuals.

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By Katherine Hamilton

UMass Chan Medical School is bursting at the seams.

Fueled in part by transformative grants since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the Worcester medical school is expanding its research, varying departments, and physical campus. To maintain this level of growth, however, there is one key ingredient: people.

UMass Chan Medical School employees

“There’s a need throughout the system for talent,” said Barbara Guertin, executive recruiter at UMass Chan. “The main reason is all growth.”

The medical school currently has 600 open positions, three times the amount that were open in January 2020. UMass was unable to provide a breakdown of which jobs were new and which were open due to someone leaving.

The increased job openings matches a surge in funding. UMass doubled its funding over the two years of the coronavirus pandemic, Guertin said, yet the number of employees at the school hasn’t seen the same uptick.

As of February, the school employs about 6,200 people, which is roughly the same as it’s been for the last decade, according to WBJ research. Yet, in the last two years, the school has received more than $500 million from the National Institutes of Health, as well as a $175-million grant from billionaire investor Gerald Chan and his family’s Morningside Foundation.

“The funding channels have really opened up for us,” Guertin said. “It’s allowing us to add positions that were sort of dream jobs that we hoped we could add at some point … We have been given a kind of carte blanche to create the perfect structure in all of our departments.”

NIH funding at UMass Chan

The demands of growth

While many of the openings are for these new dream roles, the school is looking to fill a large number of backbone jobs like building maintenance workers and technicians to care for the laboratory animals.

“UMass is expanding, but, at the same time, they’re having challenges filling positions that already exist,” said Andrea Caceres, an organizer at SHARE, UMass Chan’s second-largest union, which encompasses a wide array of workers.

In jobs where workers never got to work from home during the pandemic, UMass is seeing some significant shortages, Caceres said. In particular, animal technicians and counselors at residential mental health facilities, both of which require around-the-clock work, are in highest demand right now.

Another area of great need is data analysts, project managers, and business systems analysts for the medical school’s Commonwealth Medicine program. Originally designed to assist the state’s health and human services office with Medicaid and Medicare claims, the program has ballooned into a consultancy service for 26 states.

“Across the board, we have so many huge projects going,” Guertin said. “Many of them are grant-funded, and those grants require that we have a certain amount of researchers working on these projects. We have to have those individuals hired at the start of each project, so there’s a huge push for us to have those individuals hired.”

The medical school is offering $2,000 sign-on bonuses for some full-time research lab positions and $1,000 for some part-time research jobs.

“It’s definitely not typical,” Guertin said. “We need the researchers – we needed them yesterday. We’re adding the bonus potential, even for part-time researchers and also for animal tech folks.”

From the start of the pandemic, UMass was tapped to help tackle many facets of COVID-19, including testing and clinical trials for the vaccine. The school was one of four universities to receive a $100-million grant from NIH for its rapid testing program, and it worked on all phases of the clinical trials for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for COVID.

To house its growing research efforts, UMass announced a nine-story, $325-million education and research building in the fall of 2020. It also opened a new 48,000-square-foot outpatient clinic for veterans in November.

“Definitely, there’s concerns about how that [is] going to get staffed when the university is already facing big challenges finding current staff to fill up the open positions,” Caceres said of the education and research building, which is under construction.

The new research building is on track to be a LEED Gold building, meaning its goal is to have a net-zero energy use, which requires hiring people with certification in green technology, Guertin said.

Fiscal 2022 NIH funding breakdown

A plan for recruitment

Although both Worcester and Boston offer their fair share of talent from new college graduates, competition among healthcare recruiters is tight. UMass Chan must offer wages, benefits, and – for those not working remotely – a living situation which rivals the many medical and biotech jobs in Boston.

“Although prices of real estate have gone up in the past few years, they’re still significantly lower than in Boston and its surrounding areas, which will help recruit and retain workforce,” said Alex Guardiola, vice president of government affairs and public policy at the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce.

In the past year, UMass has raised wages and offered some retention bonuses to staff, which Caceres said has helped put UMass in a better place for recruitment.

“Wages are really, really important and kind of the first step to trying to recruit and retain staff, but there’s more to do,” she said. “We are interested in improving and making changes in this [upcoming] contract, which are more related to just how it feels to come to work every day, about having a say and being able to participate in decisions about how work gets done.”

UMass kicked off its recruitment process for the 600 open positions with a career fair on March 30, which was attended by 230 individuals. So far, three positions are filled and a dozen interviews are scheduled.

The school’s expansion, in both its personnel and physical footprint, will continue to be an economic driver for the Worcester region, Guardiola said.

“It reinforces how important it is to have a UMass Chan in Worcester for our economic growth,” he said. “It will help the entire city to grow and continue to be a competitor throughout New England and the country.”