Hospitals and other employers and nursing schools want to perpetuate that notion of a nursing shortage, and would actually love it if nursing were saturated because the bigger the pool of applicants, the less that facilities have to compete for workers, which means they don't have to pay higher wages or provide better benefits to lure in RNs to work for them. And nursing schools are run by nursing advocates, who want as many nurses out there in society as they can get because that means nursing gets more powerful politically.
Nursing isn't saturated. I hear talk of saturation every few years. Then every few years I hear people talking about how there is a nursing shortage. There definitely are slow periods. But on the flipside, there are times like right now when they can't seem to hire enough staff, and they throw tons of money at nurses to get them to come in and work extra shifts, and folks are making $800+ for every extra shift. Its all cyclical, and it seems in nursing that the cycles of boom and bust are brief, with most of the time being spent in a state of good circumstances for nurses. I wouldn't be worried about finding a job. Everyone that graduated with me, without exception... even the idiots.... are currently working not only as nurses, but from what I can see from the ones I know on facebook, all of them are doing the kind of nursing that they want to do. Not everyone started out doing exactly what they wanted, but they all are in fact now in the departments that I remember them saying they wanted to be in. All of them.... even the idiots.
The bad news about the reason that nursing always seems to swing towards the shortage style times is that nursing can suck. Hospital nursing can be a cash cow for nurses, and it is typically the place where you get the best benefits and options for a schedule you'd like (if you are a person that wants to work 6 nights on 8 nights off, you can most likely do that... if you want 3 on 4 off, then you can find that instead). But hospitals are also the places where you can expect to work yourself to burnout, even if you are just working your 40 hours each week. And that's why you see nurses jumping around to different jobs and quitting. Before I went to RN school, I read a statistic that 1/3 of new grad nurses aren't working after their first year on the job. That seems a bit high, but back then I wasn't a nurse, so I couldn't say if it seemed to ring true. But it is hard, and often you are overworked. There are units where you are essentially a waiter. There can be a lot of frustration. It is a job where you are right there with sick people, and often there isn't enough of you to go around. A typical night on a med surg floor, you have sick people that you want to spend more time with, and instead you end up having a drug addict or their guest that is spending the night syphon all of your night by hitting the call bell and making ridiculous requests and acting like they are at a resort. Your other patients suffer in those situations so you can placate a fool. Or your boss gives you so much work that you know you can't do everything the way its supposed to be done, and then that same boss has a talk with you about something they think you did wrong because someone complained.
I know little about pharmacy except that on the totem pole of healthcare prestige, the pharmacist occupies a higher station than us lowly RN's. I've yet to see a pharmacist have to suffer fools like nurses have to (except, of course, when they have to suffer through us asking them the same questions for literally the 40th time, or some other terrible thing we put them through). I also have never seen a pharmacist do 6 bed changes in one night on a 400lb patient that keeps crapping the bed. I've never seen a pharmacist slip and fall on to urine/vomit/blood/liquid stool mixed together, or get hit in the face with spit, or kicked in the neck, or have a patient tell them they would like to rape them, or have family members of angry patients try to meet them in the parking lot. The list goes on. I've walked in on nurses hyperventilating in break rooms due to the pressure or the tragedy of the moment. I'm in the process of going to NP school so that in 3 years I hopefully can be out of that kind of environment. But even though I could find a job as an RN that didn't have those negative elements, I gravitate towards the places like that because I'm decent at it, and feel like I make a contribution. So that's my perspective on nursing. I don't work in women's health, or NICU, or labor and delivery, or a few of the other less gritty places where a lot of the female nurses seem to be rockstars that love their jobs (those places actually intimidate me, so I'm not knocking them when I say that). You could find your niche, and there are a lot of them. And with NP as an option, you can find yourself in a pretty sweet gig before you are even 25. It would be sweet to be a new NP at 23 and making$110,000 to start working dermatology 4 days a week. I wish I had used my time wisely in my 20s like that.
Pharmacy seems like a good job, but I personally have reservations from my perspective. It may betray my ignorance of what pharmacists do, but I feel like it is in industry just waiting to be subject to automation. When we have self driving cars and trucks on the horizon, a robot pharmacist isn't far off (if not a robot pharmacist, then an offsite pharmacist in India remotely operating the robot, with pharmacy techs stocking the meds). I'd also be bored in a pharmacy all day, and I would hate to go to 4 years of school to do that, along with the expense. I remember when places like Wal-Mart gave BMW's to pharmacists they recruited as a perk. I also remember later on when a pharmacist student working a charity event with me told me about how bleak the landscape was for jobs. But you probably know as much as I do.
