110: Nursing Career Passport
Nursing Career Passport
In this thought-provoking podcast, I challenge the notion that nursing success is solely determined by years of experience. I talked about the importance of valuing diverse experiences that shape a nurse's career, and I urge everyone to embrace a broader perspective.
With a passion for debunking ingrained beliefs and encouraging intentional thinking, I explored the idea that everyone's path is unique and predetermined. Rather than engaging in divisive conversations pitting young nurses against their more experienced counterparts, I advocate for acknowledging and valuing the diverse range of experiences that shape a nurse's career.
Through the concept of the "Nursing Career Passport," I encourage you to reflect on your own journeys and value every aspect of your professional and personal growth. Whether it's one minute or a million, every experience, and every stamp collected in the passport, holds value and contributes to one's nursing success. I urge you not to let external opinions or social media debates dictate your career paths but rather to embrace your unique stories and pursue your goals with confidence.
Key takeaways:
03:36 - Setting the Stage: The Debate on Experience
05:22 - Challenging Biases and Perspectives
08:21- Embracing Individual Paths
12:24 - Rethinking Job Requirements and Promotions
13:29 - Overcoming Ego and Supporting Each Other
14:12 - Embracing the Nursing Success Passport
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**This transcript was automatically generated using Descript.**
Would I be the best fit in a situation where maybe they're more clinically sound? No, but the problem here is that we have ego. We have ego telling us, but I've got 12 years and they've only got 12 minutes, so we need to think of it differently. It doesn't matter how much time we have, the time and the experience is lovely and it's a great contribution, but it is not essential.
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the High Performance Housing Podcast. I hope you're all well. I've just got back to Paris, having spent nearly a week in Scotland. I was actually attending my uncle's funeral who I've talked about recently on the podcast, and it was a beautiful service. It was so lovely see everybody see my family.
And really awesome to connect with family members that I haven't seen for a long time. Of course, everybody comes out of the woodwork. And also to really see the amount of love and the amount of friendships and connections that my Uncle Ollie had made. It really made me like really proud to have been a part of his life and to overlook, you know, the challenges that he faced.
cause I think sometimes we really indulge in like the sadness of the experience, especially as clinicians as well. Like we really think about how this should never have happened and it should never have been. But then I really let myself just think on the day, like what if this was how he was meant to be?
How it was meant to go, and what can this teach us? What can I use from this to help myself grow and to help? My audience, girl, what can we use from this experience? And it was a really beautiful like moment for me to just sit there and be in awe of his life. This is totally great, but I do think to myself, why are funerals so impersonal in a sense?
Like, I expect my funerals gonna be totally different. I'm telling you right now, I'm planning it right now. I said to my partner, I said, if you run one of these funerals for me and have a complete stranger talk about my life and my life story, I'll be dead. Like I can't do anything. But I will be very annoyed because it's just like, I just want people to be up there sharing their love.
I want it to, it should be like a wedding, in my opinion. It should. We should be celebrating. We should really be celebrating. I'm a firm believer that our souls live on and they, you know, we don't die. Our body dies and that our soul lives on not religious. And I just think that that's the only way that it can be.
I think we come here to collect all of this knowledge, this wisdom, these experiences to just leave. Are you kidding me? So that's what I choose to believe, and that's a power of the conscious mind. And I just thought it was a, beautiful experience and I really sat in, awe of my Uncle Ali and what he had achieved and learned so much about him as well.
The other thing that I wanted to acknowledge here was that The aged care facility did such a beautiful thing. They invited, well, they came along, some of the staff came along that looked after him, which I just think was gorgeous. I thought it was so beautiful. And also they brought some of his peers, some of the nursing home peers, so some of the that were in the nursing home that had spent a lot of time with them, that Saturday's breakfast table every day.
Beautiful. And he had helped all of them. I found out he had like turned their music player on and yet all of the things it was just beautiful. So that's where I've been. I was back home and I'm back in Paris now. And today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about. Nursing success, passports.
I want to introduce this concept to you just to trigger some thoughts and get you thinking about your own nursing career success passports. So the reason this came to fruition, the reason why I'm talking about this today is because over the weekend on a very popular blog online, there was lots of discussion around.
The fact that doctors have to work 10, 15 years before they can become a senior and they're recognized for their knowledge, wi wisdom and experience. And that in nursing it's the opposite. And that we, you know, we've got NUS and Enums that are only five years qualified and you know, is that good? Is it not good?
Should this be happening? And the whole tone of the chat, there was like hundreds of comments. The whole tone of the chat was like, yeah, young nurses are this and young nurses are that, and we shouldn't be doing this. And. They should have more experience and they should respect their elders and blah, blah, blah.
And of course, in Tru Liam style as a professional button pusher that I am, I felt compelled deeply in my soul to respond because. I have seen light and shade on each hand of the spectrum. I have witnessed ageism. I have witnessed lack of respect at each hand of the spectrum. So I'm not gonna sit here and say that young people should be respected more and older.
CS and nurses shouldn't be. I think everybody deserves respect. It is a fundamental human right, but what I don't agree with is when we come in at one angle and we shoot at the other, and I think that that's what I wanted to talk about today in the sense that. I'm a firm believer that regardless of how much experience you have, you are on a path and your path is determined for you and that you are here to live that path.
So if your path means that you are a grad nurse and you finish and you qualify and you become a CM within two years, that was meant to happen. You are meant to experience that. And I think that what this conversation highlighted to me is that we are making shifts in the nursing profession around what used to be and what no longer will be moving forward.
cause my take on this is that when we are having these. Back and forth thought wars, cause that's what they are. They're just a collection of people's thoughts that are unprocessed, subconscious, deeply ingrained, conditioned beliefs that we've picked up somewhere on this journey that we throw back and forth at each other, expecting somebody to back down instead of really thinking intentionally like, Oh, well, what is the problem with having somebody that's an in with five years experience?
Clearly, no one else wanted the job. Clearly, they were the best fit for the job. Now, remove the biases, remove the panel biases. These things happen. Humans are humans. We do not live in a perfect world, and whether or not we agree that that person is the right person to get the job, they got the job. So what are you gonna do about it?
We can't do anything about it. We just have to live with that, and we get to decide whether we stay or we leave. So I was sensing through this feed just this like real sense of Victor mentality and I resonated with it deeply cause I have been there. I've talked about it on this podcast. I haven't got jobs other people have and I've laughed.
But the difference there is that other people got the job. And I didn't just sit there for a year, two years, 10 years going, oh my God, I should have got that job. And then I didn't make that person's life hell either. I just moved on. I just knew there was something better and bigger for me. So what I wanted to talk about here, what this triggered within me was why do we choose to not acknowledge people's experience?
Whether it's one day, whether it's 30 years or each end of the spectrum, we are devaluing. That person's lived experience and I wanted to create the nursing success passport and let you guys think about this in your own mind, because without it, we don't really get to see our whole self. We don't really get to see what it is, all of the components that actually make us who we are as a clinician, just because I've only been qualified for five years doesn't mean that that that's all the experience that I have.
Like how narrow minded would it be for me to just be like, well, you've only got five years of experience, but you've been on this earth for 30. Like what about that? The other 25 doesn't count. Why do we only look to experience when it comes to nursing as nursing experience? Right? So when you think about your nursing success, passport, I want you to think about the fact that.
Everything that you have is your nursing success passport. It's your life experience. It's your professional experience. It's your qualifications, it's your experiences, clinical or nonclinical. It's your certificates and it's your spiritual experience. It's your soul's experience on this earth. It's your lived experience.
When you go for a job, we don't separate out those things. know, just go to a job and just go, okay, I'm just gonna take the professional part of my passport with me, and this is what I'm gonna offer you today. You take the whole passport with all the pages in it, with all the stamps, all of the collectibles, right?
In order to get from A to B, you've gotta have your passport to go from Paris to lunch, and you've gotta have your passport with you. So we've gotta make sure that when we're thinking of our careers and we're thinking of. People moving towards career goals and moving towards their next job. They are collecting experiences in their passport, collecting the stamps in order to move forward to the next thing.
Why are we choosing to devalue that? Why are we choosing to say your 15 years or 20 years of life experience is not enough? Now here's what I'm gonna say. People forget. That our lived experience is so variably different. You can be a 20 year old and have had a really tough life. You can be a 50 year old and have had quite an easy life.
Vice versa, the same rules apply. We cannot. We should not. The future will not allow it. I'm telling you, the future of nursing will not allow it cause people are seeing through this shit now they know they don't have to wait 20 years to get a promotion and they don't want to. And I don't think they should either because here's what I know to be true.
The system that we have currently, that's how it's designed. And how is it working? It's not working very well. There are parts of it that are working, but we have a global deficit in healthcare. And yes, there are compounding factors there, but I believe a big factor of it is people do not have job satisfaction.
They do not have what they need from their career. They are not moving towards the things, they're not getting permission, they're not getting the investment. In their skillset. They're not collecting new stamps in their career success passport because we've gotta wait five years. Once you get five years and one day experience, you're qualified.
Who says, why is that even a thing? Now, some of you're not gonna like this idea and that's fine. I you are allowed to make up your own mind, my friends, as am I, but I can't see another way of thinking about this. I can't see another way of us acknowledging that. When somebody applies and they've only got five years of experience, that they actually have more than that.
And regardless, it doesn't matter if they want to go for it and they are the deemed the best person, whether they are or not, is totally out with our control. They don't get to decide. The universe decides they then move forward and they collect the stamp on the passport and they go for it. Why are we choosing to make these people's lives much harder than it needs to be?
If you've never been an AAM and aam and you shit on an AAM and a na, you do not have that right. You do cognitively have the right, but I'm telling you like it's a hard, hard job. So if you haven't done it, why do we think that it's acceptable to then go, well there five years, they shouldn't be doing that.
They should have 10 years, cause once you hit 10 years, you're perfect for the job. What about the person that sat in a role that's non-clinical for nine of those 10 years? That's not clinically relevant, that hasn't done anything, hasn't moved the profession forward, hasn't innovated, hasn't contributed to education, quality improvement, leadership, culture just shows up, takes breath, does the job and leaves.
I'm not shitting on that, but those people. With 10 years experience, are they better suited than somebody that joined the profession, did to their masters, has challenged themselves, has grown, has opened themselves up to risk, that's been willing to publicly fail, that makes mistakes and owns them. That drives forward the industry that introduces new ideas, influences change, changes culture for good or for bad.
Why would that person. Have to wait 10 years when they've achieved more in five minutes than the person that did in 10 years. The only variable here is the human. And it's the human that is actually doing the work. So we need to really open our minds into what is possible in shorter timeframes, like look at the whole world.
AI is gonna be running bloody the world soon. It's gonna be running healthcare. There're gonna be things in healthcare that used to take us weeks, that will take us seconds. And are we gonna say no to that? Why should we not open ourselves up to allowing people who want to pursue their goals to pursue them?
I just cannot see a world in which that is a bad thing. Gone are the days across all industries where we have to wait. We have to buy our time, like we can get so much more done in such a short period of time. I think that's why we have these cognitive blocks, because we think that it still takes 10, 15, 20 years.
Now, I'm not saying that people with 10, 15, 20 years experience should be disrespected or not invited to the party or anything like that. To the contrary. I think use them, utilize them, like connect with them, build rapport with them, network with them, like draw upon their wealth of knowledge. But again, the same thing is not true here.
We can't say that people that have 20 years experience are gonna be better in a med call. We can't say that, you know, like in all facets or all scopes of nursing that they should be called upon and that they should be relevant. Because I'm telling you right now, I've been outta practice for a couple of years.
and I, got more experience in my grads, but would I be the best fit in a situation where maybe they're more clinically sound? No, but the problem here is that we have ego. We have ego telling us, but I've got 12 years and they've only got 12 minutes, so we need to think of it differently. It doesn't matter how much time we have, the time and the experience is lovely and it's a great contribution, but it is not essential.
So to wrap it all up, I want you to think about in your life, your nursing career, your professional, your non-clinical life. Think about all of the things you've collected, just like a little nursing career success, passport. And regardless of what's in it, whether it's one minute or it's a million minutes, It doesn't matter whether it is one stamp or you've collected 24 stamps, everything, every piece of it is valuable.
Do not let anybody tell you that you are not able or capable of achieving what you want to achieve because you don't have, quote, unquote enough experience or that you have to wait. Have you ever noticed. That job adverts are very vague about this. They will have like minimum, three years experience required.
Again, I think it's bullshit. I think why do we need to have three years there? But they notice that they never say . You need to have a mandatory, you need to have a masters or mandatory. You need to have done X, Y, and Z mandatory. You need to be able to demonstrate that you can manage your mind mandatory.
You need to make sure that you can manage a team of 50 people and create a psychologically safe environment. No, they don't put any of that on there. Why? Because the people that are hiring for these jobs don't freaking know. That that's what's actually important for creating culture and the the future of healthcare.
That is what is needed. Not three years take, oh, three years, one day take, you're eligible. That's literally what happened. It's kind of crazy, right? I would love to know your thoughts about it, but your nursing success passport is what's gonna take you from A to B. There are gonna be people on the way that are always gonna shit on you.
They're always gonna say, you don't have enough experience, you're not old enough, you know, or you're too old or you've got too much experience or you're overqualified. It happens on the other end of the spectrum. And you know, that's the other person's opinion. Do not ever let that stop you from applying for what you want to apply for.
And don't ever let these posts on social media. Dictate your career path because that is also a choice. It is not a requirement that we let all of this end and that we tell ourselves, Hey, you know, some stranger on the internet said that Enums with five years experience are not as good as enums that have 50 years experience.
Maybe it's factually true. But I'll tell you something. I have worked with incredible clinicians at both ends of the spectrum. I worked with clinicians that do not want to be an enam, and they've got 30 years experience. If that is you and you are listening, please do not buy into the narrative that the person that takes the job that's only got five years is less than because they've only got five years.
Think about how you can go and support that individual. Think about how difficult that must be for them. They chose that part. I'm not giving them sympathy, but think about how you can support them rather than take away from them. And the same is true for the opposite. If you're a new nurse and you're five years qualified, and the enam that applies is 20 years qualified and they get the job, don't see that as a negative.
Think about it, dive in. How can I support you? How can I work with you? The biggest problem on reflection in my experience, my personal experience that I made the wrong decision here was that I saw the other person as a threat, and it was all ego-based. It's all ego-based, and having these conversations online where we just kind of proactively subconsciously break down.
People's dreams through these messages. Like, oh, enums, that's why we have a retention problem was the statement. That's why we have a retention problem. It's absolute trie. It's not true. That's not why we have a retention problem. In fact, that's why we actually still have people in the industry cause clearly no one wants to fill the jobs.
So these younger nurses are coming and taking the opportunity and so they should, if no one else is gonna take it, for sure, you better know that I'm gonna take him. Right. So, whether it's right or wrong, it's part of the process. So I want you to think about your nursing career success, passport. I want you to think about removing any biases that you have about the number of years of experience.
Really, curiously think about, does that even matter? Why does that even matter? Right. Like you could be 50, come in as a a second career nurse and you could be a nu by 51 if you wanted to. If you've worked in the banking industry and you've been, I don't know, running banks or being a bank manager, what, why would you not be able to come in and manage a team within a year as nursing?
Why do we need to have nurses in senior nursing roles? Especially a management role. I beg to differ. I hope that in my lifetime we see a time where we have non-clinicians coming in to manage clinicians. I mean, we've proven that we're not that great at that and there's no support. So what are we gonna do?
We either support the clinicians and help them become amazing, exceptional leaders, or we bring people in that are trained in leadership, culture, development, managing business, and they run it like that. I mean, what would be so bad? It can't get much worse than it already is. So I want you to just be open.
To using your nursing success passport, collecting your stamps, collecting your experiences, flicking through it, being proud of it, and seeing the opportunities that present themselves and going for them regardless of this perception of needing more experience. I hope this has triggered something within you.
I hope that you take this and run with that. If you're somebody that's sitting on the fence thing and I don't have enough apply, This is your sign. Apply for the job regardless. Okay? Apply for it. Do it. If you need to chat to me, you want to chat to me, book a call. Let's explore. And I will see you in the next episode.
