Mary Michaud, who teaches and advises undergraduate students in the certificate in health policy program, recently gathered a group of alumni of the La Follette School’s MPA program to talk about the kinds of skills and attributes they find useful in their work in health policy. Their conversation, which touches on what hiring managers look for in health policy job candidates, is a useful tool for current students as they prepare for their future careers in health policy.
Policy analysis training
According to Beth Kohler (MPA ’00), policy analysis skills allow you to clearly define the problem that needs to be solved but is a basic step that is often skipped. “Making sure you take that step to ensure those working on the problem have a shared understanding of what you are trying to solve is a key way you are able to proactively avoid unintended consequences,” says Kohler, who has served as the Deputy Director of Arizona Medicaid and is now the Chief Executive Officer of the Arizona Association of Health Plans.
Lily Schultze (MPA-MPH ’19) is a senior analyst on the health care team at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in Washington, D.C. She says policy analysis is so beneficial because it allows you to go deep on a topic when starting with little to no background. “Policy analysis includes how to do background research on the problem and really examine who has a stake in it, really taking the time to understand the problem you’re dealing with.”
Ability to identify stakeholders
Grant Cummings (MPA ’10) says that identifying stakeholders is critical for any project his team takes on. “In Medicaid, we’re thinking, ‘What does this mean to the implementation people, to the rules people, to the policy people?’” Cummings, who is the director of the Rate Setting Bureau in the Division of Medicaid Services, Wisconsin Department of Health Services, says that the ability to think through what the numbers mean to each of a policy’s stakeholder groups is a terrific skill to have in any policy role.
“The piece in policy analysis about identifying all relevant stakeholders becomes really important in health,” says Alex Hartzman (MPA-MPH ’12), director of analytics in health care strategy at the National Opinion Research Center, where staff are often hired to perform quantitative analysis. In his work with the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute he specifically looked at patient interests, which have often been systematically left out of health policy decision making. “Identifying the frameworks to address really complex problems—some of those that came up in cost-benefit analysis, for example—become really important when analyzing the impact of government budget outlays,” he says.
Ability to critically examine data
“Quantitative skills can be scary to a lot of students but, in my case, they turned out to be some of the most beneficial skill sets I took away from grad school,” says Schultze. She advises students to take statistics and economics courses, as they pay off once entering the health policy industry. “You may not use statistical programming in your everyday work, but when you work with someone who does, it’s important to know how to specify what’s needed in the analysis, what it takes for them to actually do that work and how long it takes,” she says. And some organizations advertise positions that require more quantitative policy skills than others.
“The biggest need I see among the policy positions we advertise is quantitative skills,” says Hartzman. He recommends that in addition to basic numeracy skills, health policy professionals need to be able to take apart the methods and ask what is behind the numbers. They should be able to identify patterns and regressions to the mean, knowing that it is not the average but the margin that matters, he adds. “Someone who says, ‘I’m afraid of numbers,’ or ‘I’m not good at numbers’ would end the interview for me,” Hartzman says. Michaud adds that mixed-methods research (using a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis) is increasingly valuable in health policy. “Policy issues sometimes demand that we dive deep into the deeper meaning offered by qualitative research while also recognizing the power of analyzing survey, clinical, claims or other types of quantitative data. Gaining some training in both is golden.”
Ability to take initiative
According to Hartzman, being able to take the initiative to collaborate with someone and to know how to move things forward are very valuable skills in a health policy career.
“A lot of what we’re doing requires a certain degree of self-direction…it’s really important that someone can take initiative to take on the projects or steps to move the ball forward down the court,” Cummings says. “What’s the next step? How much time will it take, and who needs to be involved? Coming to those ideas yourself and not waiting for direction is what’s needed given the pace, complexity, and volume of our work.”
Schultze says that the combination of taking initiative along with good policy analysis skills and critical thinking is what allows health professionals to figure out the ways to find out more about an issue and lay out the steps needed to break the problem down into manageable parts.
Kohler says that multiple skill sets are needed to be successful as a health policy professional, so the willingness to learn has become one of the most important things she looks for in a candidate. Kohler looks for people who can say, “I don’t know everything, I’ll never know everything, but I will find out what we need to know.”
Lilian (Lily) Schultze (MPA-MPH ’19) is a senior analyst on the health care team at the U.S. Government Accountability Office in Washington, D.C., where she works on projects related to health care delivery and financing in the United States across Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Indian Health Service, private markets, public health, and prescription drugs.
Beth Kohler (MPA ’00) has served as the Deputy Director of Arizona Medicaid as well as the Deputy Policy Director in the Arizona Governor’s Office. She has also worked as both a fiscal and research analyst for the Arizona Legislature. Beth is now the Chief Executive Officer of the Arizona Association of Health Plans and as an independent consultant to Medicaid and public health programs across the country.
Grant Cummings (MPA ’10) is the Director of the Rate Setting Bureau in the Division of Medicaid Services, Wisconsin Department of Health Services. After graduating from the La Follette program, Cummings worked with the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, where he worked on long-term care and Medicaid before moving to DHS.
Alex Hartzman (MPA-MPH ’12) is director of analytics in health care strategy at NORC, the National Opinion Research Center. Hartzman works with teams who analyze data systems from CMS (the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services) and other government systems from Census and CDC as well as proprietary private data sources on special topics.
– Adapted by Clare Brogan from an interview transcript