Can a switch to healthcare save your career?

Key Findings

The job market is currently anemic, with the healthcare sector driving recent jobs growth. After last month’s revisions, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that healthcare grew by 693,200 jobs in 2025 while all other sectors shed 512,200. Healthcare may present more job opportunities for workers of all stripes, as they can pivot into healthcare professions or find a role in line with their current skills in the healthcare sector. In this analysis, we track how Glassdoor ratings differ for employees who already work in healthcare, and for those who transition into it. Glassdoor ratings tend to be worse in healthcare, but since 2024 workers in the sector have been more optimistic about the business outlook than elsewhere.

The future looks brighter in the healthcare sector

Healthcare is both a set of jobs and an industry, and the industry employs a broad set of professionals. In this section, we examine Glassdoor reviews differ in healthcare as an industry. 

Workers in the healthcare sector gave lower ratings in 2025, with an average of 3.53 compared to 3.62 for all other workers. Even when we control for differences in ratings across occupations (accounting for the fact that the sector is dominated by healthcare roles which tend to have lower ratings), ratings in the healthcare sector are .05 points lower than ratings in the same professions in other sectors.

The current view of the healthcare sector is better in one way: workers see brighter futures for their employers. In the Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index, we track how employees rate their employers’ 6-month business outlook.

Employee confidence started to decline broadly in 2023. In 2024, confidence rebounded for employees in the healthcare sector in a way that it still has not for other workers. Since 2024, employee confidence has been 3.7 percentage points higher in the healthcare sector than in the full index. Analysis from Indeed Hiring Lab showed that healthcare & social assistance became a much larger share of the workforce during this period, growing from 14.1% in January 2024 to 15.0% in December 2025.

Healthcare professionals give harsher Glassdoor ratings

In 2025, healthcare professionals gave their employers an average Glassdoor rating of 3.56, compared to 3.70 for all other workers. While this may seem like a modest change in the average, this represents a meaningful difference: 33% of healthcare professionals give their employer a 5-star rating, compared to 38% of other professionals.

Healthcare workers’ ratings have been lower since before the pandemic. They rose in 2020, but the improvement did not continue in 2021 as it did for other professionals. Other workers’ ratings have seen a sharper decline since that peak, narrowing the healthcare worker satisfaction gap. This healthcare worker satisfaction gap holds across all Glassdoor sub-factors. 

Average ratings for healthcare workers are lower across each of the workplace sub-factors Glassdoor users review, though the difference is not uniform. Average ratings for career opportunity and diversity & inclusion are only slightly lower, while the gap in compensation & benefits and senior management ratings is largest. 

Pivots to healthcare benefit certain workers

In some professions, workers are happier with their employers in a healthcare setting than elsewhere. Security guards, for example, give an average employer rating of 3.83 stars when they work in healthcare but only 3.35 when they work in a different industry. The table below presents the top 5 jobs that are better in healthcare.

We can also directly examine workers who became healthcare workers after previously working in a different role or sector, either by getting into a healthcare profession or find another professional role in the healthcare sector. We previously analyzed how Glassdoor ratings change for workers when they switch employers compared to those who stay. Using that same dataset, we analyze workers who took these two different paths into healthcare.

The workers who became healthcare professionals saw their ratings fall slightly, from 3.58 on average to 3.54. Workers who joined the healthcare sector but not as a healthcare professional saw their ratings increase from 3.60 to 3.65. These gains were modest compared to workers who switched employers but remained outside of healthcare, whose ratings increased from 3.68 to 3.81. This trend holds when we account for prior employer rating, which our old research found had a strong influence on the probability of switching employers and on average ratings in the new role.

While healthcare workers generally tend to give their employers lower ratings, workers in some non-healthcare jobs are much happier after switching to healthcare, presented in the table below.

Business development professionals, scientists, and product managers saw the largest increase in ratings when they joined the healthcare sector compared to their previous jobs.

Conclusion

As a sector, the future looks rosier to workers in healthcare than it does elsewhere: there’s sustained jobs growth and the business outlook looks strong. However, Glassdoor reviews suggest you might want to pause before making the switch. Ratings for healthcare workers are lower across every factor except positive business outlooks, and Glassdoor users who transitioned into healthcare (either by becoming a healthcare professional or finding a different role in a healthcare company) did not see the same gains as other users who switched companies.

Methodology

The brighter outlook presents results following the Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index methodology. Sector-level results compare ratings from workers at healthcare sector industries to all other companies, excluding companies that Glassdoor has not mapped to an industry. Similarly, occupation-level results compare ratings in healthcare jobs to non-healthcare jobs, excluding occupations that Glassdoor has not categorized. Within-occupation differences are calculated either by presenting the coefficient from a linear regression with occupation-level fixed effects. Results are robust and very similar in magnitude at different levels of occupation specificity.

To analyze pivots into healthcare, we identified Glassdoor users who provided two consecutive reviews in the 2021-2025 window from different employers. Users who started in healthcare roles or the healthcare sector were excluded. Workers who became healthcare professionals had initial jobs that were not healthcare and second jobs that were. Workers who joined the healthcare sector but not as healthcare professionals moved into a non-healthcare job in a healthcare sector company. The reference group was all other job switchers, so those who moved from non-healthcare roles to non-healthcare roles at different companies but stayed outside of the healthcare sector.