Walgreens is paying for its workers to pursue careers as pharmacists

Pharmacists are among the highest-paid healthcare professionals in the US, but the industry has nevertheless struggled to attract and retain talent in recent years.

The Covid-19 pandemic placed additional demands on pharmacists, as they were asked to manage new testing protocols and vaccinations without additional staff support. These pressures led to walkouts at major retail pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens.

At the same time, fewer students started enrolling in pharmacy school. The number of applications to colleges of pharmacy declined by more than 64,000 between the 2011–2012 and 2021–2022 school years, according to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.

As a result, many pharmacies are now facing a labor shortage, with the number of open jobs outpacing expected graduates from pharmacy school programs. “We know that pharmacists are critical to the healthcare of our communities, and we don’t have enough in the marketplace,” Sal Venegas, SVP, talent management for Walgreens, told HR Brew.

Walgreens is seeking to tackle this issue by covering prerequisite courses for employees interested in pursuing a pharmacy degree. The program is expanding after a successful pilot, and Walgreens hopes it will help the chain strengthen its pharmacist talent pipeline, Venegas said.

How PharmStart works. Walgreens’s PharmStart program launched last year with a pilot program in select US states. The retail pharmacy, in partnership with Guild, agreed to cover eligible employees’ prerequisite courses for pharmacy school. Those who participate also have the opportunity to earn an associate degree in Biological Sciences through the program.

Venegas and his team brought the idea for PharmStart to executive leadership after learning that many Walgreens employees were interested in becoming pharmacists, but encountered barriers to entering the profession.

Walgreens worked with its Deans Advisory Council—a cohort of deans from 17 different pharmacy schools that are advising the chain on the pharmacist shortage—to develop the program. Some of the primary barriers PharmStart seeks to address are financial and logistical. The average pharmacy school student graduates with more than $170,000 in debt, Healthcare Brew reported last year, and pursuing this career track while holding a full-time job may be complicated.

“Being a working professional and being in school can be challenging,” Venegas said. The PharmStart program aims not only to ease “financial burdens,” but also to give employees “personalized support” in light of that challenge.

PharmStart participants that don’t have any prior college education should be able to complete the program in about two years, Venegas said. He emphasized that all the classes can be completed online, and said Walgreens has tried to give students “a lot of flexibility” in light of their dual responsibilities.

When working with Guild to design the PharmStart program, Walgreens wanted to make sure it was going “to be flexible enough and adaptable enough to meet this working adult population,” said Hanna Patterson, SVP of employer partnerships with Guild. She also said the company wanted to make sure managers are kept in the loop when their employees participate in the program.

Challenges remain. During the pilot phase, PharmStart was available to nearly 10,000 full-time employees across 25 states who had worked with Walgreens for at least one year. As of January, just over 1,000 Walgreens employees had been accepted into PharmStart, and 221 were actively enrolled in classes, according to the company. In light of this level of interest, Walgreens recently expanded the program to all 50 states.

Once Walgreens employees complete the PharmStart program, they’ll then have to make a decision about whether to pursue pharmacy school. The company also has programs that it hopes may incentivize employees to continue their education, Venegas noted. One such program subsidizes up to $40,000 a year for pharmacy school students if they commit to working for Walgreens for four years after they get their pharmacist license.

Ultimately, Venegas said Walgreens recognizes that PharmStart participants may choose not to become pharmacists after completing the program, “going into, say, a pharmacy operations manager role or a store manager role” instead.

While educational benefits may help improve talent pipelines for incoming pharmacists, retail pharmacies like Walgreens still have to consider how to retain their current talent, said Dave Mott, a pharmacy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Current shortages are driven not only by pharmacists leaving the profession, but also going to work in different settings. A pharmacist may decide working for a chain is too stressful, for example, and elect to work for a government, insurance company, or hospital instead, he said.

“There’s definitely this desire to move out of those retail environments…into environments where pharmacists may not have to be dispensing medications to patients,” he said. “They’re sort of working more behind the scenes, setting policies and dealing with drug costs and drug reimbursements.”

Nearly three-quarters of practicing pharmacists rated their workload as “high” or “excessively high” according to UW-Madison’s 2024 workforce study. Pharmacists in retail or chain settings were more likely to report high workloads than those in other settings, like independent community pharmacies. Developing internal strategies to boost well-being among pharmacists who are currently working in these high-stress environments may prove more effective than investing in future talent, Mott suggested.

PharmStart is one of several initiatives Walgreens has developed with the goal of “positioning community pharmacy as a practice setting of choice,” Carly Kaplan, the company’s director of corporate communications, told HR Brew via email. Pharmacists also have access to an employee assistance program that provides counseling for issues such as burnout, stress, and anxiety, as well as health and wellness counseling.