If you work in a veterinary practice or in the pet industry or in a business that supplies goods or services to the industry and you have something to say - why not become a 'Guest Blogger'?
For more information click here to read our: Guidelines for Guest Bloggers
If you read Part 1 of this series, where I discussed one of the key reasons for losing our valuable professionals – loneliness – you’ll know that I do not profess to have peer-reviewed, big-data statistical evidence backing up my assertions. I’m not arguing with existing industry studies where given a drop-down box of potential choices with zero nuance or time for genuine self-reflection, we have stats that show that people are leaving our profession for all sorts of good reasons: incivility, remuneration, further study, etc.
What I’m talking about is the gap. The 50% of people who tick the boxes of “disillusionment with the profession” or “working in a non-veterinary role”, or “other”. These are the places where statistics don’t help us.
What I instead bring to the table is the outcome of conversations with hundreds of veterinary professionals and veterinary leaders, many of whom are trying to plan their exit from the industry, where I can dig deeper, ask harder questions, challenge surface emotions, and get into the nitty-gritty, terrifying beauty of nuance.
From these conversations, combined with data and evidence from other larger professions, I am proposing the five reasons I believe we can’t keep good vets or great nurses. And to be honest, I’m not even proposing the five big-ticket ones; I’ve filtered them primarily based on the stuff that no one else is talking about. The conversations that aren’t being had, the reasons that aren’t being researched, of uncomfortable truths or contentious discussions that no one wants to be attacked for on social media.
So, with that fairly overarching defence of my completely un-veterinary approach to having an opinion and the hope that you might read Part 1 of the series HERE, I’d like to pitch the next big contentious topic: the Big B.
And no, it’s not Burnout. We talk about that plenty, and there are people way smarter than me working in this space (ok, admittedly, I also work in this space, but that wouldn’t sound as catchy), so I’m not putting it on my list.
When I talk to vets trying to get out of the industry, it takes a lot of pushing and poking to help them get to the crux of articulating this emotion. Many of them will use softer terms, the ones that feel more professional, like “unfulfilled”, or “lack of career development”, or even “frustrated”. But when I really boil down what’s going on and move past all the political baggage, what people are is BORED.
Just as many people who need my help for burnout, come to me to discover that they are just bored.
I personally didn’t spend long in full-time clinical work. After graduating, I moved quickly from my disaster of a first job into locuming part-time to fund my global travels, then I worked in welfare and quickly discovered that leadership was where I was headed. It wasn’t until 2019, when I had quit my safe CEO job to go full time in my global consultancy with a primary marketing model of speaking at conferences a month before the pandemic shut down the universe, that I actually found myself being a clinical vet for 40 hours a week. Obviously, the first few weeks were a bit of a blur of re-learning dose rates, re-remembering drug interactions, and discovering things that hadn’t existed when I’d last practised.
But a couple of months in, I started having what I could only describe as panic attacks. I had experienced two panic attacks in my life previously, and this felt physiologically like exactly what was happening. I would look at an afternoon list of booked consults, and my heart would race, my ears would pound, and I’d get a sort of red-faced tunnel vision. A sense of dread.
And I would wonder: what on earth is happening? I’m not panicking about back-to-back vaccines, diarrhoea and dermatology. I’m not anxious about another white staffie chewing their feet, or a cavoodle with mucousy poo. Why am I having a panic attack?
It took me another couple of months to work out that I wasn’t having anxiety about the consults. I was having anxiety that this might be my life for another 10 years, or 20, or 40. That the rest of my life might be broken down into 15-minute repeated conversations about worming, grass seeds, and kennel cough.
I coined this sensation my Boredom Anxiety.
As vets and experienced paraprofessionals, we have so much knowledge. We work so hard and so long for this goal of the dream job. We imagine long, exhausting days, but we imagine saving lives, making breakthroughs, and engaging in meaningful conversations with our extended village in the community of pet owners we live among.
And us incredibly smart, driven, Type A personalities work our butts off, constantly learning and growing and pushing ourselves to get the degree. The first job has an epic learning curve, and we’re killing it with milestones, new experiences and ticking boxes of growth, learning and development as a person and professional.
And then…
Well, and then nothing.
We get three or five years in, and the curve is gone. Maybe undertaking additional study, joining associations or attending conferences or workshops becomes our crutch for a while. Perhaps we even specialise if you’ve got that sort of mind – or you don’t, but it’s a logical next step, so you do it anyway and then discover you’re just as bored a year after Boards. Maybe we take on a Senior Vet or Head Nurse role, thinking that it’s our career’s sensible, logical progression (“NOW I’ve made it, and I’ll go back to developing as a professional”.)
But then, leadership isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Or, more often, we actually aren’t well suited to leadership and should have remained a technical expert. Unfortunately, there’s no progression in being a really great vet, so we buy a practice or manage someone else’s anyway, even though it makes us miserable (and usually the people around us, too).
A vet friend of mine expressed recently that he loves being a vet, but he needs to take on a leadership role because he feels like he’s at the peak of what he knows, and he’s terrified that from here on in, it’s a slippery slope into becoming one of those old vets who doesn’t keep up with the trends and becomes mediocre holding onto the established skills he has and retiring in 20 years with the same amount of knowledge he had last year.
We all know that vet, right? My friend is right for it to scare him.
And those feel like our choices.
Leadership which we’re not really suited to.
Specialism if you have the privilege of being able to afford 4 years of minimum wage.
Or stagnancy.
Or leave…
There’s a learning curve in working for industry.
There’s growth potential in government jobs.
There’s fulfilment and a sense of being needed in deciding not to return to work after kids are born.
There’s greener grass and more status in going back to study medicine or law.
Or there’s a new challenge and personal growth in starting my own Tupperware pyramid scheme.
But here in the veterinary profession, we are left with the potential for the next 15, 20 or 40 years of our lives in 15-minute incremental repeats of vaccines, diarrhoea, and dermatology.
And please don’t get me wrong; some people love this. Some people are wonderful at this, are enriched and still adore meeting new puppies. They can find growth and fulfilment in connections with pet owners, micro-credentials or alphabet collecting, and hopefully mentoring younger generations. But as a stereotype of the sort of people our profession is currently selecting at the university level, unfortunately, this sense of fulfilment is often satisfied only by change, striving, and eyes on the next prize.
And so they’re setting their sights elsewhere. On prizes and pastures out yonder.
And so, with no more nuanced way of articulating why we’re opting out of our crazy, boring, thrilling, repetitive, unpredictable profession, we tick the box of “disillusioned with the veterinary industry” and move on.
Want to continue on this journey of professional challenges with us? Stay tuned for Part 3 of The REAL reasons we can’t keep veterinary professionals in the veterinary profession.
Dr Jess Moore-Jones is an occasional vet, a challenge-the-status-quo type of business owner, a no BS-consultant, and an engaged mum (except at 5am when she's a very mediocre mum). Having led teams large and small, from animal shelters to zoo departments to specialist hospitals, Jess is slightly annoyingly obsessed with keeping vets engaged, fulfilled and resilient in our profession. After a leadership career of transforming toxic cultures, reducing staff burnout, and helping nurture the self-awareness of young leaders, Dr Jess decided that she could support more vets by bringing her skills to any organisation that had the courage to recognise that they needed some help. Now she runs Unleashed Coaching and Consulting, with the sole aim of Keeping Veterinary Professionals in the Veterinary Profession. Unleashed works with veterinary teams, individuals and leaders to build resilient teams, engaged cultures, and thriving businesses without any of the academic psychobabble or politically correct but unrealistic advice you could have googled.
Connect with Jessica:
On the Covetrus Veterinary Podcast: Partners in Practice, learn how AI scribes are transforming consults, saving time, and giving teams the breathing room they need to focus on what matters most: patient care. In our second episode, we’re diving into one of the most...
