Abstract
This paper provides insights into the role of ongoing training and education on nurses’ career satisfaction across different career stages and their ability to provide quality patient care. Eighteen focus groups were conducted over the course of five months in 2015 (January to May) in eight Canadian provinces. There were a total of 185 focus group participants. Each focus group lasted approximately 1.5 h and included 8–15 participants who self-selected in one of three distinct career stages (students, early-career, mid- to late-career). A thematic analysis of the data revealed that ongoing professional development is an expressed need and expectation for nurses across the various career stages. Student and early-career nurses expected sufficient training and education to facilitate workplace transitions, as well as continuing education opportunities throughout their careers for career laddering. For mid- to late-career nurses, the importance of lifelong learning was understood within the context of maintaining competency, providing quality patient care and enhancing future career opportunities. Training and education were directly linked to nurses’ career satisfaction. Healthy work environments were identified by nurses as those that invested in continuing professional development opportunities to ensure continuous growth in their practice and provide optimal quality patient care. Training and education emerged as a cross-cutting theme across all career stages and held implications for patient care, as well as retention and recruitment.
Highlights
There is a well-recognized need for a sustainable nursing health human resources strategy to ensure quality patient care in light of a potential nursing shortage and staffing shortfalls, as well as an aging workforce
While a number of cross-cutting issues emerged in the focus groups, the potential to access training and education opportunities were important to nurses’ career satisfaction and retention
Generational differences in the workplace have been studied for more than forty years with a growing interest in the last decade in exploring intergenerational differences within the nursing workforce. This project focused on career stage, rather than age, to explore and understand nurses’ experiences, expectations and needs because generational typologies may tend to oversimplify the characteristics of each cohort, failing to account for variations and overlap, in individuals born close to the beginning or end of the time period identified for the generational cohort
Summary
There is a well-recognized need for a sustainable nursing health human resources strategy to ensure quality patient care in light of a potential nursing shortage and staffing shortfalls, as well as an aging workforce. Previous work on generational diversity [2] with the objective of informing health human resources (HHR) planning. In terms of organizational HHR sustainability, turnover represents a significant cost in the form of potential declines in organizational productivity, capacity and cohesion, as well as financial losses. The financial cost is potentially significant with $25,000 as the average cost per nurse associated with nurse turnover [3]. The turnover rate for new nurses is. 493–501), suggesting a cumulative loss for organizations that have invested resources in recruitment and training. For organizations seeking to retain staffing resources, understanding the expectations, experiences
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