When Nursing Is Not Your Passion

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

Nursing now makes several top ten lists in the press, including best ROI from education, best employment prospects, and least likely to be eliminated by Artificial Intelligence. This is a good news, but also a bad news situation. The good news is that we will likely be able to continue to recruit top students into the profession. The bad news is that many nurses start nursing programs only with economic motivations. They quickly learn that nursing is challenging when they take those first nursing positions. It will be stressful and unsatisfying if you can’t find joy and satisfaction in serving others.

For months, nurse leaders have told me that many new graduates are entering nursing but seem to lack the calling and passion to do the work. They enter the profession with very high expectations but have challenges feeling fulfilled. They complain that “the work is not fun” to leaders who are surprised that you would not have anticipated this coming into the profession. One leader recently related the following story when a young staff came to her and told her she was leaving nursing.

So, one of my young nurses came to me after finishing her residency program and told me she planned to resign and leave nursing. This was devastating to me because I believed she had great potential. Of course, I tried to coach her and asked her what brought her into nursing in the first place. Her answer surprised me. She told me that the idea of entering college to pursue her BSN was her parents’ idea and not her own. They wanted to be sure she could make a living and told her there would always be a job in nursing. The problem was that she didn’t like the work and could not see herself doing this for the rest of her career. She was directly admitted to a BSN program right out of high school and had never worked. She had no exposure to the profession and was not passionate about it. 

Nursing faculty report that they are seeing these trends in their classrooms. They have students tell them that their parents had selected their major and had done the due diligence on how to apply for programs. These faculty noted that while these students were very bright – they had not considered other options. Deans report that the parents seemed more interested in the nursing program during orientation than their children. Some even delay taking NCLEX to avoid entry into the profession. This behavior does not occur with accelerated degree students who had entered nursing as a second career with clear goals.

This dilemma is a downstream problem from the financial stress and anxiety felt throughout society right now. College is expensive and usually comes with loan debt upon graduation.  Finding and maintaining high quality employment can be challenging. Month after month on the US jobs report, the healthcare sector leads all others in job production. It is not surprising that students are pivoting to where the opportunities are.

The news is not all bad but does create unique challenges for healthcare employers. Most jobs for new nursing graduates continue to be in acute care settings. The work is hard, patient acuity is high and patients and families are not always civil. Turnover rates continue to be extremely high in the first two years of practice and residency programs are an expensive investment that does not always lead to higher rates of nurse retention.

I was recently asked by a nurse leader whether I thought nursing was a calling that some have and others don’t. My response is that for some nurses (usually with family illness experiences and exposure to nurses), I think it is a calling but probably not for the majority. The key may be instead to help students find what they are really good at and feel passionate about and then help them to link it to their work. The strength of our profession is the many directions that one can take in their career to find fulfillment. We are in a different time right now and have to think differently about our profession and those who enter it.

© emergingrnleader.com 2024

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