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Building and Supporting Your Workforce

Find the information and resources to help recruit and retain laboratory staff, and create an environment where employees can do their best work and grow with you.

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Getting started

Understanding Your Workforce

Public health laboratories operate in a uniquely complex environment shaped by CLIA regulations, emergency response expectations, specialized testing, and government driven public health priorities. Understanding your workforce requires deeper insight into technical capacity, regulatory readiness, surge response capability, and leadership development needs.

Public health laboratories must anticipate retirements, succession needs and pipeline shortages, especially as many laboratorians approach retirement age. Understanding demographics helps forecast staffing gaps and maintain essential testing capacity.

  • Workforce Studies 
    Get insights about the public health laboratory workforce that can guide strategic decisions by identifying key factors that influence recruitment, retention and engagement across the public health laboratory workforce, including workforce profiles, salary comparison and training needs.
Recruitment and Retention

Finding and Keeping Your Workforce

Recruit for Open Positions

Post your open positions on APHL's Laboratory Career Center, a job board made specifically for public health laboratory and adjacent positions. APHL members receive a discount; contact [email protected] with questions.

Post a Job in the APHL Laboratory Career Center

Drivers of Employee Recruitment and Retention

In this competitive market, it’s essential to optimize your recruitment and retention strategy for new hires based on what they really want and need in a job. Explore our Laboratory Workforce Profiles for insights on recruitment and retention. Highlights include:

Report
2025
Laboratory Workforce Profile 2024: New Hire Desires
Results from the APHL 2024 Laboratory Workforce Profile Survey highlight what is most important to new laboratory hires, both during the application process and now that they’re employed.
Quality Systems and Analytics, Training and Professional Development

Expand Your Recruitment Pool

Partnerships and outreach are essential to building our workforce, since many promising candidates may be unaware their skills can be applied in a public health laboratory (or know that they exist!). We must increase the visibility of public health laboratories with scientists entering the job market and ensure there is a pathway to employment for them.

Increase Visibility:

  • Academic Partnerships
    Our Academic Partnerships program can help you connect with academic institutions, attend career fairs and more.
  • Public Health Laboratory Ambassadors
    Our Public Health Laboratory Ambassadors program empowers laboratory employees to engage with local students, increasing visibility and understanding about careers at public health laboratories.

Build Career Pathways:

  • Laboratory Internships
    APHL places current students in your laboratory for short-term, part-time projects.
  • Genomic Data Internships
    APHL places graduate students with training in molecular biology, genetics, microbiology and bioinformatics in your laboratory for at least a year. Positions are part time and often remote position.
  • Fellowships
    APHL places recent graduates in your laboratory in a full-time position for at least a year.
  • Become a Mentor
    Learn more about hosting an intern or fellow at your laboratory!
Professional Development

Support Employee Growth at Every Stage

Create a Career Ladder

A comprehensive career ladder for public health laboratory professionals is important for building and supporting your workforce. It demonstrates how individuals can enter the public health laboratory workforce, advance their technical expertise, and grow into management and leadership roles while contributing to the public health mission.

A clearly defined career ladder provides transparency, motivation and equity for the public health laboratory workforce. It helps professionals understand required competencies, education and experience at each level, supports succession planning and strengthens laboratory capacity by retaining skilled staff. For organizations, career ladders promote workforce stability, knowledge transfer and leadership development. For individuals, they offer purpose-driven career growth, skill diversification and long-term professional fulfillment.

A well-defined public health laboratory career ladder strengthens the workforce by clarifying pathways for growth and advancement. By recognizing varied entry points and valuing technical, managerial and leadership contributions, career ladders help ensure the long-term effectiveness of public health laboratory systems and the professionals who support them.

Goals for Bench Level Scientists:

Entry-level laboratory professionals perform routine testing and support functions in accordance with standard operating procedures. Responsibilities may include specimen processing, performing assays, maintaining equipment, and adhering to quality and safety requirements. These roles focus on skill development, accuracy and understanding regulatory and quality systems.

Mid-level and advanced professionals perform complex testing, troubleshoot methods and may serve as subject matter experts. They often mentor junior staff, contribute to method development or validation, and support quality improvement initiatives. Advancement at this level reflects increased technical expertise, independence and responsibility.

Goals for Managers and Leaders:

Supervisors oversee daily laboratory operations and staff performance. Responsibilities include workload coordination, training and competency assessment, quality assurance oversight, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Supervisory roles blend technical expertise with people management and communication skills.

Laboratory managers provide strategic and operational leadership for laboratory units or sections. They are responsible for budgeting, staffing, policy implementation, performance metrics and cross-functional collaboration. Managers play a critical role in aligning laboratory services with organizational and public health priorities.

Senior leaders provide vision and direction for public health laboratories at the organizational or system level. They guide strategic planning, partnerships, laboratory operations, quality testing, emergency preparedness and innovation. These roles emphasize leadership, policy influence, stakeholder engagement and long-term sustainability of laboratory services.

To become a laboratory director, it requires a combination of advanced education, specific laboratory experience and meeting federal CLIA regulations. The exact pathway varies by degree type, but the requirements are well defined. Most professionals become eligible for high complexity Public Health Laboratory Director positions after 8–14 years of combined education, laboratory experience and certification.

Keep Going:
Growth for Every Career Stage

Professional growth shouldn't stop when you reach a certain career stage. Explore programs specifically for laboratory leaders so you can better support your organization.

Explore Professional Development Opportunities