Due to work and school, I have been immersed in thinking about nursing and education a lot in the last three years. Nursing and teaching are pretty similar professions in three large ways — both fields are dominated by women, are considered “caring” or “service” professions, and have high rates of attrition (with people leaving the field entirely). Other professions have high attrition too — I teach students who are re-training for new jobs either due to being laid-off or because their first profession wasn’t a good fit.
So this got me thinking…and thinking…and thinking. And my conclusion from the thinking is that a helpful part of people’s education as they decide on a career could be to ask a series of questions that alert people to key non-task features of certain types of jobs. For example… some jobs are more 9 to 5 and your off-time is yours, while other jobs have flexible scheduling but may require work at home. Some jobs require you to be on call, some require travel, some offer overtime. Some jobs run on a specific schedule so your time off may always — and only – be at holidays and summers, while others may offer more opportunity to decide your own time off. I suspect that those facts about certain types of jobs have as much to do with people leaving the professions as the tasks people do on the job.
My professional life works best for me because my schedule is about 90% flexible. I have to be in class to teach, and I have to be at certain meetings, but that’s only a total of about 8-10 hours per week and the rest of my work hours (which often go over 40 hours per week during the academic year) are my choice and can change week-to-week. My life works because of this — I can rest a lot and pace myself in ways that work around my health and around the rest of my life. I do most of my teaching work (preparation, grading) at home, a lot of it on weekends, so my time at home is often work-focused. And I don’t get to choose my vacation time — I can’t just take a week off in mid-October or go to an out-of-state wedding in March. The downsides are such small prices for me to pay in exchange for the flexibility that I have, and I also appreciate the fact that when I’m off (over a teaching break, for example), I’m off — nobody has any sense that they are allowed access to me on vacation. But, I know plenty of people who would not want to work at home, or who want to be able to take off on vacation during the off-season.
So, I just wonder whether people understand these types of job features as they choose a profession. Seems like some of the “interest inventory” surveys that people take could include questions related to professional lifestyle (for lack of a better phrase).
And that’s my big idea. 
(One of my friends has a category called “My Big Ideas” on his blog, and this felt like the right title here.)
