This is my rant. You may or may not agree with it, but I felt the need to express it among people who might understand where I am coming from.
I graduated from nursing school in August. I had quite a good GPA and was class vice president. I still wound up applying for over 50 jobs (beginning in late July) before getting an offer in November and starting my first job this week (beginning of December). The problem I faced was that the hospitals only wanted to hire new grads for February and July start dates (about 1 to 1.5 months after the December and June graduations). They wanted to train all the new grads together. So, I repeatedly received replies to my applications like "we are not hiring new grads at this time" or "we have no positions available for new grads - please contact us again at a later date" My frustration with this was extreme. I could not afford to wait until February to start working - that's six months after graduating. What was I supposed to do in the mean time? Knit?
And yet, we are still in a nursing shortage where I am - there are dozens of RN jobs posted on each hospital's website. They just all insist that you have at least one year experience as an RN before they will even consider you. But how am I supposed to get experience when nobody wanted to hire me because I was a new grad?
This system is flawed. If we want to increase the number of nurses in the system we need to eliminate these bottlenecks. This also goes for admission to nursing schools. There were over 400 applicants for 65 spaces in the nursing class I was in. The college simply couldn't support a larger group at once. This is partly because of the fact that tenure track professor positions are only available to people with doctorate degrees, and until very recently, there were very few doctorate degrees available relating to nursing (there were many that were semi-related such as anatomy or public health). Without the job security and pay raise that tenure track professors receive, there has been little motivation for nurses to become professors (most take a significant pay cut to go into teaching), so there are not enough nursing professors to increase class size to meet demand. The new doctorate of nursing practice degree is the best step that nursing has taken as a profession in a long time since it may ease that bottleneck and make entering the profession of nursing smoother and less stressful.
