Welcome to an exciting Miller household update which has been in the making for some time – and provides us all with something meaningful and actionable! No, it doesn’t involve children; that was only ever implied from my headline (yes, I know it’s not proper grammar; just kidding!).
People familiar with my site might recall that my wife made a career switch from landscape architecture to nursing.
Nursing is a fast-growing field with low unemployment rates (2%), rising demand, recession-proof qualities (people still need medical help even during recessionary times) and all four of the factors necessary for job security – yet she had difficulty breaking into nursing post graduation.
Experience is of utmost importance in employment. This holds particularly true in medical fields, with their constant risk of liability and steep learning curve. Therefore, experienced workers tend to be preferred over less-experienced ones almost always.
Just getting an interview was an enormously daunting challenge that required us to pursue aggressively in order to overcome. Although our strategy worked, the job itself wasn’t ideal:
As previously discussed, my assignment was on a high turnover unit with undesirable hours (7 pm to 7 am), lower benefits and pay, and an extremely high patient workload.
However, her job had some drawbacks; finding employment when starting from scratch can be daunting and finding employment at first can be even more so; sometimes taking what’s available can mean taking less-than-ideal positions; for her this meant not going for her first choice – with its 1.5+ hour commute each way from her place of employment in rush hour traffic after working an 18 hour night shift (I can only imagine). Unfortunately though, getting into three higher preferred employers was just not happening for her despite several attempts.
At first, her work was extremely difficult. Being a new nurse with six patients to care for without enough training can be intimidating; yet she managed to overcome that daunting learning curve quickly and gain invaluable experience.
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