This week’s announcement is easy to scroll past. It doesn’t involve a drug approval, a reimbursement change, or a regulatory crisis. But it may be one of the most strategically important moves the profession has made in years, and every pharmacist who cares about what the workforce looks like in 2035 needs to understand what it represents.
What ASHP Announced
ASHP announced a new partnership with HOSA, Future Health Professionals, focused on educating middle and high school students about pharmacy career paths and pharmacists’ roles as essential members of the patient care team. The partnership builds on ASHP’s national public awareness campaign, “We’re Your Pharmacist,” which aims to increase understanding of hospital and health-system pharmacists’ direct patient care roles in ensuring safe, effective, and accessible medication use. By engaging students early in their healthcare career exploration, ASHP and HOSA seek to broaden awareness of pharmacy as a clinical, innovative, patient-focused profession and support the future pharmacy workforce.
“HOSA students are already interested in health care, yet many have limited awareness of what pharmacists do in hospital and health-system settings,” said ASHP executive vice president and CEO Samuel V. Calabrese. He added: “This partnership allows us to share real-world examples of pharmacy practice with students and highlight the innovative roles pharmacists play in improving patient care across healthcare settings.”
As an elite partner with HOSA, ASHP will provide students with personal, career, and leadership development opportunities designed to increase understanding of pharmacy practice. ASHP will sponsor the pharmacy science competition at HOSA’s International Leadership Conference, where students qualify through local and state contests and complete written and skills-based components to earn scholarships. ASHP will also host pharmacy career workshops during the conference and provide guidance and resources for student advisors.
Why the Pipeline Problem Starts at Age 14
To understand why this partnership is strategically important, you need to understand the severity and specific nature of the workforce gap the profession currently faces.
Employment for pharmacists is projected to grow by roughly 5.6%, adding more than 17,000 new positions nationwide. While there are approximately 14,200 annual openings, only about 12,639 graduates are entering the workforce each year, creating a persistent talent gap. Technician shortages are even more pronounced, with the majority of retail pharmacies and hospitals reporting significant gaps.
The graduation data tells an even more unsettling story. In 2023, the number of PharmD graduates was 12,639, a 15% decrease from a peak of 14,905 in 2018. Pharmacy schools are receiving the lowest number of applications in almost 20 years. The lack of interest in becoming a pharmacist results from negative perceptions from reports of burnout, poor working conditions, length of training, and high tuition costs.
The shortage reflects multiple converging factors: concerns about job market saturation in the early 2010s, rising educational costs where PharmD programs often exceed $150,000, and shifting perceptions of pharmacy as a career path. The result is a generation gap that will take years to correct.
The shortage is not uniform across practice settings. From a broader perspective, pharmacy technician shortages are described as “a systemic challenge nationwide, especially in rural areas and less densely populated cities,” severely limiting the ability to scale services such as sterile compounding, centralized distribution, and advanced medication access programs, while contributing to burnout among existing staff. Few pharmacy professionals enter the field with experience in prior authorizations, payer navigation, benefits investigation, and care coordination for complex patients.
The clinical specialties where the profession needs talent most urgently, precision oncology, pharmacogenomics, clinical hospital pharmacy, and specialty access navigation, are exactly the areas where the shortage is most acute. And that shortage will not be solved by recruiting harder among college students who are already considering healthcare careers. It requires reaching students before those decisions are made.
The Perception Problem That Drives the Pipeline Problem
Here is the real issue the ASHP-HOSA partnership is designed to address: the vast majority of Americans form their understanding of what a pharmacist does at the retail counter. That image, accurate for a shrinking portion of actual pharmacy practice, is the image that drives career interest, or the lack of it, among the 14-year-olds who will make college and graduate school decisions in the next four years.
ASHP CEO Paul Abramowitz articulated this directly at the launch of the “We’re Your Pharmacist” campaign: “We want patients to understand that within health systems, whether they are in the hospital, seen in a clinic, physician’s office, or other setting, pharmacists are working with the care team to ensure their medication therapy is optimal, safe, and effective. We also want to inspire students who are currently in middle school and high school to one day have a highly rewarding career as a hospital and health-system pharmacist.”
The student who sees a pharmacist at a retail counter filling prescriptions does not see the pharmacist on the molecular tumor board reviewing next-generation sequencing reports. They don’t see the precision oncology pharmacist facilitating biosimilar substitution across 17 states. They don’t see the pharmacist coaching a patient through GLP-1 therapy and preventing a hospitalization. They don’t see the pharmacist who called them proactively because their rescue inhaler refill pattern indicated uncontrolled asthma.
HOSA’s membership includes students already interested in healthcare careers. Pharmacy school involvement in HOSA state and national conferences, including exhibiting and presenting symposiums, has been identified as one of the highest-leverage strategies for recruiting future pharmacists. Engaging students at this stage, before they narrow their healthcare career options to medicine or nursing, is where the profession’s pipeline is most responsive to intervention.
The Demographics That Make This Urgent
Gen Z will soon be the largest segment of the workforce and values purpose-driven work, flexibility, career growth, and diversity. They seek organizations committed to social responsibility, work-life balance, and technological innovation. Gen Alpha is anticipated to prioritize personalized career experiences, continuous learning, and environmental and social responsibility.
The clinical pharmacist of 2030, the one operating in the three value zones mapped in a prior issue of this newsletter, matches these values almost exactly. Precision oncology pharmacists lead tumor boards and drive personalized medicine. AI-fluent pharmacists integrate technology into patient care at the highest level of clinical complexity. Healthcare entrepreneurs build clinical service models with genuine community impact. The profession has a compelling recruitment story for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, but that story is not reaching them.
ASHP’s investment in HOSA changes that. A high school student who attends an ASHP career workshop at the HOSA International Leadership Conference and meets a pharmacist who describes reviewing genomic sequencing reports, managing checkpoint inhibitor toxicities, and building a direct-pay GLP-1 coaching practice will have a fundamentally different image of pharmacy than the one formed at the retail counter.
What Practicing Pharmacists Can Do Right Now
ASHP’s investment in HOSA will take years to move the graduation numbers. The more immediate opportunity belongs to practicing pharmacists, and it starts with a much simpler action than an organizational partnership.
Interns who work throughout pharmacy school are more likely to apply for residencies at those hospitals, and many go on to become clinical pharmacists within the same system. Health care executives and practicing pharmacists should explore innovative strategies to secure pharmacy talent by expanding early career exposure opportunities.
Every pharmacist reading this newsletter has a professional network, a clinical setting, and a story that would change how a high school or college student thinks about this profession. The pharmacist who speaks at a HOSA state conference or a high school health science program is not doing community service. They are performing direct workforce development with a 10-year return.
HOSA chapters exist at more than 4,000 schools across the United States. Most of them have never had a hospital pharmacist, a precision oncology pharmacist, or a clinical entrepreneur speak to their members. The access is there. The barrier is whether practicing pharmacists view outreach as part of their professional responsibility.
Consider what one conversation with one HOSA chapter advisor could generate: a classroom of 25 health-interested students learns that pharmacists sit on tumor boards, advise on genomic sequencing, manage the most complex drug therapies in existence, and build clinical businesses worth significantly more than a dispensing margin. Even if 5% of those students go on to pursue pharmacy, that chapter visit produces one or two future colleagues who might not have otherwise chosen the profession.
The Long Game Behind a Short Announcement
Zoom out from this week’s news and look at what it represents in the arc of the profession.
The pharmacist workforce shortage compounds the burnout crisis. Burnout drives early exits from the profession and reduces the supply of experienced mentors and preceptors. Fewer mentors means fewer students who encounter pharmacists in clinical roles during their formative years. Fewer clinical role models means fewer students who choose pharmacy with an accurate understanding of what the profession can be. The cycle closes on itself.
ASHP’s partnership with HOSA is a deliberate intervention at the earliest point in that cycle. It reaches students before the perception calcifies. It connects them to pharmacists whose career stories reflect the profession’s future, not its retail past. And it does so at a scale, HOSA’s 300,000-member student network, that individual pharmacy school outreach programs cannot match.
The profession’s future depends on who chooses to enter it. And the pharmacists who mentor, precept, and engage with student health programs are not simply contributing to someone else’s pipeline. They are building the workforce that will be beside them when the clinical demand peaks, when the specialty workforce gaps are most acute, and when the profession needs its next generation the most.
Your Action This Week
ASHP invites pharmacists to get involved in the HOSA partnership through the “We’re Your Pharmacist” campaign website at YourPharmacist.org, where toolkits are available for individuals, organizations, hospitals, health systems, schools and colleges of pharmacy, and state affiliates.
Beyond that resource: identify one local high school or community college with a health science or HOSA chapter. Contact the faculty advisor this month about doing a 30-minute career talk, a virtual classroom session, or a job shadow day. Describe what you actually do, the clinical complexity, the patient impact, the business model, not a sanitized overview designed for a career fair brochure.
The students who hear that story are the colleagues the profession needs. The conversation takes 30 minutes. The return is measured in careers.
Sources: Drug Store News (ASHP Partners with HOSA to Introduce Students to Health-System Pharmacy Careers, May 2026), ASHP NewsCenter (ASHP-HOSA Partnership Announcement, May 2026), ASHP PR Newswire (We’re Your Pharmacist Campaign Launch, May 2024), RPh on the Go (Pharmacy Workforce Solutions 2026: Trends and Strategies), Becker’s Hospital Review (Pharmacy Leaders Sound Alarm on Brewing Workforce Crisis, February 2026), Visante (Future of Pharmacy Workforce: Beyond Shortages, 2025), ShiftRx (Pharmacy Staffing Shortage: Causes, Impact and Solutions for 2026), Research.com (Is Demand for Pharmacy Degree Graduates Growing or Declining, 2026), PCOM (The Pharmacist Shortage, January 2026), Pharmacy Times (Combating the Post-Pandemic Pharmacy Workforce Shortage, May 2026), USC School of Pharmacy (Attracting the Next Generation)