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The McKinsey Global Institute's new report, Workforce in Motion: Skills and Pathways to Future Jobs in the United States, projects that healthcare support and healthcare professional roles could add about 3.5 million jobs by 2035, the two largest net gains of any occupational groups it studied. It also finds that most of the workers who could fill those jobs can't get there without help.
For a rural hospital, both findings point the same way: build the pipeline yourself, from people who already live nearby.
Demand keeps rising, and AI won't offset it
An aging population drives much of the growth. Demographic change alone accounts for roughly 8 million net new jobs across the economy, concentrated in long-term care, chronic and specialty care, pharmacy, and care coordination.
AI won't cancel that out. MGI expects automation to reach about 26 percent of work hours for healthcare professionals by 2035, compared with roughly 80 percent in office and administrative support. In roles with chronic shortages, like nursing, the report expects productivity gains to relieve overtime and burnout rather than cut staff.
The workers are close by, but the path is unpaved
At the same time, about 11 million workers may need to leave declining occupations, mostly in office and administrative support, retail, food service, and logistics. In MGI's reallocation model, healthcare support is the single largest destination for those workers. Many of them already live in the communities your hospital serves.
The catch is what MGI calls pathway quality. Only about one in seven transitioning workers has a direct pathway: high skill overlap, no pay cut, and a short credential timeline. Nearly half face an unpaved one. Healthcare is the hardest case in the report. Clinical roles share relatively few skills with each other or with other fields, and 96 percent of growing healthcare professional occupations require a mandated license or certification. MGI's own example, a dishwasher moving into home health aide work, starts with just 20 percent skill overlap.
The report draws the conclusion plainly: healthcare shortages won't be solved by simply redeploying workers unless pathways are deliberately built around stepping-stone credentials and training capacity.
Three barriers MGI names, and what apprenticeship does about each
Start with credentials. About 85 percent of growing jobs require one of some kind. A registered apprenticeship builds the credential into the job: related technical instruction, supervised on-the-job learning, and exam prep all happen while the apprentice is on your payroll.
Then there's the income gap during training. MGI notes that a worker with limited savings or caregiving duties may rationally turn down a good pathway because they can't go weeks or months without pay. It also finds that 92 percent of growing healthcare support employment sits in the bottom two wage quintiles, which makes unpaid training even harder to justify. Apprenticeship pays from day one. That removes the biggest reason a capable EVS tech or dietary aide says no to a sterile processing pathway.
Finally, geography. Healthcare support work has essentially no remote option, and MGI finds that matching workers only to jobs in their own state shrinks the pool of direct pathways. For a Critical Access Hospital, the answer isn't recruiting from farther away. It's building the pathway close to home, for people who already plan to stay.
MGI also recommends treating healthcare as a ladder rather than a single destination, with short-cycle care roles, mid-cycle technician roles, and long-cycle professional roles. Apprenticeship fits that design. A patient care tech who finishes one program is a strong candidate for the next rung, such as surgical tech or sterile processing.
The evidence that apprenticeship delivers
McKinsey names creating apprenticeships as one of the ways employers can lower credential barriers, and federal research backs up the payoff. A 2026 Department of Labor impact evaluation found registered apprenticeship produced significant gains in employment and earnings, with strong effects in healthcare specifically. DOL data has also put retention among apprenticeship completers at 91 percent, a direct answer to "we'll train them and they'll leave." Compare that with the alternative: the American Hospital Association reports hospitals spent about $51.1 billion on contract and agency staff in 2023, with smaller and rural hospitals leaning on it hardest.
Where to start
The workforce shift MGI describes is already moving. The question for a rural hospital is whether the people leaving retail, food service, and front-office jobs in your county move into your open allied health roles, or somewhere else.
Craft Education is the turnkey workforce partnership and data platform behind programs like this. The slow parts come pre-built: apprenticeship sponsorship handled at the program level, work process schedules, program templates, and Pangea Learning named on day one as the related technical instruction partner for roles like surgical tech, sterile processing tech, EKG tech, and patient care tech. We braid WIOA, Perkins, SAEF, and Workforce Pell funding, and cost to the employer is low when the funding stacks line up. Craft Connect tracks every hour and competency through to the credential.
Your side is identifying candidates, naming an executive sponsor, and signing the agreement, and most cohorts start within 30 days of sign-up. Start the Conversation with a 30-minute discovery call, and we'll look at which of your open allied health roles could run as a cohort and which funding streams fit your sites.
