Grow Our Own

Posted on October 5, 2006
Filed Under Community Partnerships, Education, Healthcare, Out of Market Recruiting |

I have to be frank. The recruiting solutions that Recruiting Nevada delivers should only be considered a temporary fix to Nevada’s severe critical shortages, especially in the areas of nurses and educators.

The real solution….. “We need to “Grow Our Own.” That means our system of higher education needs to graduate enough students in those particular fields. There is a lot of complexity behind this.

We need to attract students to critical need professionals while they are in K-12, educate them on those profession and then get them enrolled in the programs at the local colleges and universities. Upon graduation we still need to keep them in our state.

That means – the colleges and universities need to have the programs, the faculty members to teach them, and then we, as employers, need to have internships or preceptor programs to effectively engage and retain the recent graduates.

Nothing made this more evident than the nursing shortage. After studies were conducted in 2001 it was found that our higher education system was graduating just 330 nurses each year while our rapid growth demanded nearly 800 new nurses annually.

The good thing is that we caught the problem. The bad thing is it would take several years to change legislation to correct it and then 2 more years before the nursing schools could begin accepting more students into the nursing programs.

In the meantime, the problem would continue to worsen without ‘out-of-market’ recruiting efforts like those of Recruiting Nevada. Recruiting from other markets is a good short term fix, but ‘growing our own’ is the real solution. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing, in 10-15 years, if we found Nevada as an exporter of nurses, rather than an importer?

Until then…..”Let’s grow our own.”