Re: Jobs Abound Without Need For a Degree



On Wed, 4 Oct 2005, zach wrote:


Straydog wrote: 
On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, zach wrote:


leslie wrote: 
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/3377892
   HoustonChronicle.com - Jobs abound without need for a degree

  "Oct. 1, 2005, 8:59PM

   Jobs abound without need for a degree

   By BANKS ALBACH
   Knight Ridder Tribune News

   WASHINGTON - Some U.S. jobs pay living wages, are in quickly growing
   fields, have lots of openings and don't require bachelor's degrees.

   Most of them aren't glamorous, but they won't be offshored anytime
   soon either, according to an analysis by the nonprofit agency Jobs for
   the Future.

   Its report, The Right Jobs, profiles these winners, among others:

   Registered nurse

   Income range: $40,100 to $57,500. Projected annual openings: 110,119.
   Education: associate degree in nursing.

   Note: School admission is highly competitive, but the acute nursing
   shortage is expected to double by 2015.


This is still, and probably always will be, a female-dominated field. A
male RN may do better in dealing with the politics (women tend to
back-stab each other more than they do to men),

This is a very perceptive observation.

Not just mine...

Oh, I didn't say it was just you and me. There was a(nother) perceptive article on this, believe it or not, in the WSJ years ago. Front page and not LTE, either.

having worked with a lot of women at several different 
jobs, I've had the more sane ones bemoan this fact... having finished
my adolescence in a PC world, I would never dare volunteer this fact
out loud. When women tell me, then it is ok to talk, and hear horror
stories...

Yep. And, while I'll agree that in male-dominated environments, females may get left in the dust, I can also proffer that in female-dominated or controlled environments, THEY will gang up on the males as if they are alien vermin to be sprayed with insecticide.

and also dealing with 
male doctors with big egos and sexist attitudes (though the latter is
slowly changing as the generation shifts).


Would you say..."becoming PC"?

Those salaries may be low, 
too. Nurses can put in a lot of overtime (1.5x, or double-time).

Due to the geriatric demographic shift, I'd say just about anything
involving medical care, especially geared to the elderly, is a sure
bet. That is, at least, until they socialize medicine and salaries,
quality of care, and research gets slapped down.


The insurance industry is already "socializing" medicine and on two
levels: i) controling costs/payments, and ii) expanding the bureaucrasy
(this includes committees, procedures, protocols, pre-authorization,
pre-certification, and -- I am aware of -- at least five categories of
outsourcing). Quality of care going down? To some degree it has been doing
this for a while now. I've read stories about hospitals even taking
disposable instruments, kits, needles, and syringes, and devices and
sterilizing them for re-use to cut costs! In my neighborhood there have
been some very big and ugly public fights between insurers and hospitals
over reimburement rates.

Another caveat on what to go for. Yes, health care may expand in the
future, but if the projections of "bankruptcy" for medicaid, medicare, and
health plans for retirees from fat city big corporations happens sometime,
say, a decade or two from now, this whole industry will experience a large
contraction. And, on the specifics: I'm not just reading about it, but
hearing about a fairly large wave of recruiting of nurses from Africa and
the Philipines (matched by a layoff of domestic nurses). The stories I
hear about turnover in the nursing population are very heterogeneous and
every time I go for any healthcare, I ask the ladies in white what they
know. One woman nurse, who was a FT nurse but also running a cash register
PT at a local Lowe's store told me--when I asked her about turnover in the
nursing jobs--told me something like "Well, some of the people who come
into nursing think there isn't any _work_ involved" as if she were one of
those over-acheiver types OR there are a lot of wimp women trying to do
nursing. Otherwise, they are all happy in the small clinics and offices;
hospitals can be different-either pretty good environments, or not at all.


*Sigh* My mother is in her mid 60s and _still_ complains about how
crappy a career nursing is and how much she hates it. The thing is,
however, is that she has been doing it for over 40 years and has pretty
much always hated it.


She couldn't have hated it that much or she would have gotten out of it.

Back then, it was more of an idealistic career
for women.

True, but doctors also treated nurses worse, too. They had bigger egos back then, and everyone at a hospital feared doctors. Now, that the insurance company industry has bloodied MDs (never thought I could say a nice thing about insurance companies, but, what the hey?) and the psychological wingdings of job infrastructures are valid discussion subjects, sometimes PCness is not so bad.

These days, it pays a lot better,

All depends on what _it_ is. They do have "nurse's aids" that get crap wages, too.

all things being equal, 
but it seems as hard as ever. She's been in geriatric care for the past
two decades, the Alzheimers' facility she recently quit being quite a
hellhole. Terrible patients to deal with, terrible owners,  terrible
staff (it was in a bad part of town--- the CNAs (Nurses Aids) mostly
being particularly bitchy, not just to her as a Supervisor either, but
to all of the staff). Over the years, I've learned to see through what
she says and recogize when she is having interpersonal issues with
people that _may_ be partially due to her eccentricities, but I visited
that place and it was pretty bad.

No lie, but I've heard the stories that are paralleled in the newspapers: not all facilities are alike. There are decent ones, there are expensive ones, and there are ones you don't want anyone to end up in, not even your enemies.

.

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