Pam,
First I would let you know I agree with tridil2000 that you are likely not educating Millennials any longer as I am a Millennial and am 39 years old.
I would like to address some of the statements in your article.
1)”Millennials tend towards skepticism. After all, their parents were baby boomers who didn’t trust anyone over 30! “
I am skeptic but I don’t think it is because my Boomer parents “didn’t trust older people.” I buck authority and am generally distrusting of upper management, Government, and organizations/corporations because I saw how my parents were treated by the corporate world. They were fired for no reasons after years of loyal service (10-15 years at a time) their 401Ks depleted while they looked for a new job and were given pittance for their experience because they lacked higher education. Then I watched as less experienced but degreed labor were hired into their positions at half the rate they had taken 15 years to earn. (So did the company really value the degree and or was letting my parents go an easy way to increase their coffers and higher educated employees just an acceptable excuse to kick out my parents?) Then my parents got new jobs and had it happen all over again. Now they are in their early 60s with maybe 40k for retirement and now having ever increasing difficulty finding new jobs because of ageist attitudes, being offered poverty level pay for all their experience, and needing to continue to work because they can’t go without health insurance.
And really I’ve seen this also play out with several of my RN co-workers who actually like bedside care and don’t want to be in management or further their education. They’ve worked at the same hospital for 15-20 years and their hourly pay is crap compared to what I was making as a new grad. The best increases in pay that I have received as a nurse have been when switching jobs with different facilities. So tell me, why should I or any employee should give a who-ha about our employer’s expectations? I am all for the attitude of my needs and life first and whatever I have left I can give to my employer for the highest price. (BTW- I didn’t start out feeling this way about my career, but it certainly didn’t take long once I started working as a nurse to see that the ‘calling’ and dutiful nature of healthcare professionals was and is being completely manipulated by the business of medicine to squeeze out as much cash from us that they can with no concern for our well being or the patient’s (aside from the expectations that have to be met to prevent a law suite.)
2) Your overall assessment of younger generations has obvious prejudice based on stereotypes and a deafening lack of understanding of how the work environment has changed from when you were coming up as a nurse and current economics. Boomers, because there were so many of them, had steeper competition for jobs. They were often having to bend over backwards to keep poorly compensated positions while the infrastructure for bargaining was being depleted at alarming rates due to stupid “Right to work” laws. Today there is a shortage of workers and a shortage of trained workers. Bargaining and unions are slightly on the up tick but companies (especially hospitals) are mostly still working on the premise that they can get away with forcing their employees to “do more with less” and then not appropriately compensate them. Younger generations are showing this attitude from their employer the middle finger. Your generation looks at that attitude as ungrateful and entitled.
Now from the time you started as a nurse until now the patients have gotten sicker, are staying in the hospital a shorter amount of time, nursing staff are being cut as low as possible and care is being provided by CNAs and less by RNs, students are being pushed through RN programs that are very substandard in hands on training compared to when you were in school and paying out their rear ends to get through these programs. Then they get out of school with all their theory but insufficient hands on experience due to a lack of instructors and/or out of concern for liability by the school. They go to work and get put in preceptorships with RNs who have to high of patient loads to teach the new grad the skills they didn’t get to learn in school, then when they are on their own, are overwhelmed, slow, and struggling with the MANY gaps in their education, us experienced nurses call them sissies (like you have in this article) and wonder why they are crying and can’t make it through a shift.
In conclusion, we give new RNs great theoretical knowledge but poor hands on experience prior to graduating a ludicrously expensive nursing program; promise them support upon hire at a facility and fail them again with RNs who can’t train them due to pseudo staffing shortages instituted by hospitals to increase profit margins; bully them once they are on their own due to their lack of ability to keep up by passively aggressively calling them entitled for wanting to have regular breaks at work, being able to eat lunch uninterrupted, to not be called every day you are off to be asked to come back to work, and giving them minimal raises each year; ....and you can’t see why none of them want to stay at the bedside and wish to only have minimal experience before starting a higher level program in hopes of appropriate pay and a better work/life balance?!?!?!?
