Could You Have Been a Nurse?

One of the running jokes in our family is professing that you could have been something professionally other than what you are when you’re watching a movie, streaming show or the news. Over the past few weeks, I’ve said I could have been a folksinger, the pope, a chef, the president, a crime-fighting priest, a detective chief inspector or a genius mathematician at Cambridge. It always gets a polite chuckle.

But I am what I am, as Popeye would say, and that’s a journalist. That profession has taken many specific forms over the decades: reporter, editor, photographer, columnist, blogger, writer, content strategist and ghostwriter among them. I wouldn’t trade any of them for another career. Except for maybe the crime-fighting priest gig.

Would you be something else if you had to do it all over again?

What brought this to mind were two new rankings of careers. The first is Gallup’s annual ranking of the most trusted professions. The second is U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of the best jobs. The two annual rankings have one thing in common: nurses.

The Gallup ranking is based on a poll of 1,000 U.S. adults age 18 or older conducted in December. Gallup asked consumers to rate the honesty and ethics of 23 professions. Nurses topped the list with 76% of the consumers rating the honesty and ethics of nurses as “high” or “very high.” Grade-school teachers were a distant second at 61%.

Lobbyists and members of Congress finished at the bottom at 21% and 23%, respectively. Newspaper reporters and TV reporters didn’t fare much better at 17% and 13%, respectively.

Meanwhile, nurses peppered U.S. News’ annual ranking of the 100 best jobs in America. U.S. News uses five weighted metrics to select what jobs make the list. The weighted metrics are future prospects (30%), wage potential (25%), employment (20%), job safety and stability (15%), and work-life balance (10%).

Here’s how five nursing jobs ranked:

• Nurse practitioners (No. 1)
• Nurse anesthetists (No. 16)
• Registered nurse (No. 54)
• Licensed practical nurse (No. 88)
• Nurse midwife (No. 99)

No journalism jobs of any kind made the list of 100 best jobs. I scrolled through the list three times. Checking facts is a core competency of being a journalist.

Like you, I read a lot about nurse burnout, nurse turnover, nurse retention, nurse vacancy rates, nurse shortages, nurses retiring early, nurses leaving nursing, traveling nurses, nurses moving away from the bedside, etc. Maybe all that’s true. But it’s also true people trust nurses and nursing, especially compared with most other professions.

It’s too late for me to change professions. But if I had to do it all over again, maybe I could be a nurse if all the crime-fighting priest positions are taken.

Thanks for reading.