In this episode of Work in Progress, Dr. Sally Saba, vice president and global chief inclusion and diversity officer for Medtronic and president of Medtronic Foundation, joins me from SXSW EDU 2025 to discuss the organization’s Medtronic Spark initiative, a ten-year global committment to introduce one million students from low-income households into high-paying health tech careers.

Technology has transformed the health care sector for the past few decades, from robotics to wearable technology, to telemedicine, and, of course, artificial intelligence. This is creating a huge and growing talent gap in health tech, both in the U.S. and around the world. And the way you do those jobs is also changing.

“They say between around 11 million of shortages just within the next four to five years. You add onto that how AI is going to transform and evolve the landscape of education faster than people can keep up,” says Dr. Saba.

The Medtronic Spark initiative intends to prepare one million workers for those jobs today and in the future. “They say that 65% of students in schools today will work in jobs that don’t even exist yet, and 45% of the workforce today will need new reskilling to even be able to keep up with that future.” Saba adds.

In the podcast, she explains that initiative will focus on students through high school, right before they start looking at their careers.

‘We don’t want to touch lives, we want to change the trajectory of lives,’ Saba says.

Medtronic Spark will be a combination of online and hands-on training, with a focus on making it accessible for low-incoming families. It will include three main components: innovation labs for students to tinker with technology, scholarships to help students graduate, and job-ready credential programs in high-demand health care technology roles like clinical mapping and pacemakers.

Medtronic employees will be able to get involve by sponsoring students, providing mentorship, and helping designing credentialling programs.

Medtronic is in 150 countries and 40% of the initial programing will be in the U.S. Find out more details of the initiative in the podcast, which you can listen to here or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our podcasts on the Work in Progress YouTube channel.

Episode 360: Dr. Sally Saba, VP Chief Global Inclusion and Diversity Officer, Medtronic; President, Medtronic Foundation
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Theme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4
Transcript: Download the transcript for this episode here
Work in Progress Podcast: Catch up on previous episodes here