Healthcare is a leading industry for job growth, but those entering the work force are quickly learning a hard lesson — open positions do not necessarily translate into opportunities for the inexperienced, according to CNNMoney.
Many healthcare employers are blatantly disregarding new graduates and unseasoned nurses.
Survey results from the American Society of Registered Nurses reveal that nearly 43 percent of newly licensed RNs remain unemployed 18 months after graduating, CNNMoney reports.
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How quickly conditions in healthcare have changed. It was only a few years ago when there were plenty of jobs and the challenge was filling them. Now, nursing students leave school and face the challenge of getting hired.
New nurses increasingly find themselves competing against seasoned professionals, whom employers tend to view more favorably.
Peter Buerhaus, an RN and economist who teaches at the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing, believes the recession is to blame. The nursing industry was shedding over 70,000 workers per year before the financial crisis, but that has changed.
"Many of those nurses are still in the work force, and they're not leaving because we don't see a convincing jobs recovery yet. They're clogging the market and making it harder for these new RNs to get a job," Buerhaus says.
“Because there is no empirically based understanding of how recessions affect transitions into and out of the RN work force, employers and work force planners are unable to anticipate how many nurses might choose to leave the work force once a robust jobs recovery begins,” according to an article Buerhaus co-authored in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Aggravating matters is a surge in nursing school enrollments, which is making the industry even more crowded.
Although nurses are currently witnessing stiff competition, conditions are not always expected to be this way.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for RNs is estimated to grow by 26 percent through 2020, the Memphis Business Journal reported.
“We've been really worried about the future work force because we've got almost 900,000 nurses over the age of 50 who will probably retire this decade, and we'll have to replace them," Buerhaus said.
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