Dara Warn: Chief Customer Officer at Penn Foster (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.

In which me and my cohost osmosis, Chief Medical Officer, Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government.

And they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well. I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Bulani and today on Raise the line, I'm happy to be joined by Dara Warren, who's the chief customer officer at Penn Foster Education Group.

So we always like to ask our guests that raise the line more about their background. How did you get into healthcare education as well as uh now at Penn Foster uh higher education?

Great. That, that's a great question.

So, um I've always been passionate about business and helping organizations grow and f foundational to helping organizations grow is really the people aspect, the human capital aspect that really drive and power.

A lot of organizations. And so I was able to find throughout my career, opportunities to help individuals develop, advance for further their career first, primarily with medical education through my work at Pried, where we're offering continue continuing education for primary care and other physicians.

And now at Penn Foster, where our goal is to help individuals and employers find the next best job. And so I think when you're able to pair a really actionable occupation oriented learning, um it helps both the individual learner as well as the, the organizations that they work with.

Given that our audience uh consists of a lot of students and early career health professionals. Do you have any advice to them about meeting the challenges of COVID-19?

Um or just moving forward in general? And I think that there's always the foundational health care skills.

But I think what we've seen during this, this COVID environment is this real toll on our healthcare workers mentally and getting ready and, and, and really having to sort of show up every day in a very difficult environment.

It's really important to think, not just about your technical skills, but about your own personal skills. And um you know, mental health because we need both of those things to be strong, to have the healthcare workforce that we need.

And the second thing I'd say is that I think we've also seen during COVID, the huge amount of satisfaction, personal satisfaction and professional satisfaction that can come by entering into a healthcare field.

So I commend you all for the work that you're doing and the training that you're doing and, you know, wish you the best as you take on a really, really important role within our society.

COVID is, is forcing us to think about things in new ways. And I think we should be open to new ways of training a new path into health care roles.

Um And you know, really, just keep an open mind for, for what technology and online training paired with hands on training can really do for the workforce of the future.

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