Healthcare sector attracts fewer recent graduates | Interior

“The fact that it is mainly the elderly who are starting a new job in healthcare points to the success of the lateral entry,” reports HR services group Acerta. “More and more people are making the transition to healthcare from another sector.”

The analysis was based on figures from 800 healthcare companies. The average age of new healthcare workers has risen in five years, from 37 to 39.5, partly due to lateral entrants. The number of men finding their way to a new job in healthcare is at its highest level in the last five years. Nevertheless, the sector remains pre-eminently ‘feminine’.

“There is a decrease for both under-25 year-olds (-16.9 percent) and 26 to 35-year-olds (-5.9 percent), ” the analysis states. “But the efforts made by the healthcare sector and the government to attract more diverse groups of employees through lateral entry are bearing fruit.”

In the age categories 36-45 and 46-55, the number of entrants rose by just over 8 percent last year. For 56-65 year-olds, this was even 55.8 percent, although these are very low absolute numbers.

At 33 percent of the total number of entrants, the 26-35 year-olds still represent the largest group, followed by the 36-45 year-olds (23.3 percent) and the under-25s (19.4 percent).

Acerta expects that more recent graduates will again enter the company in the coming years. After all, figures indicate that enrollments in care courses are on the rise. Meanwhile, thousands of vacancies in the sector remain unfilled. “Nursing remains the bottleneck profession number one in Flanders, despite various efforts,” the analysis concludes.