Yesterday was officially my first day in my new career. There were parades, dancing babies, an aerial show, the Chinese national ping pong team, rainbows, and unicorn fights to commemorate the occasion. Unfortunately I missed it all because I was sitting in a tiny classroom doing orientation. Today was much of the same, but was a little harder to sit through. The part of the orientation that applied to me was over after about an hour, and the rest was directed at the new nurses. I paid attention, hell if I can glean any useful information out of it then bonus. The only problem was most of it was filled with jargon and abbreviations that I didn't know, so it was difficult to pull much out of it all.
On the plus side, I got a chance to talk to my new boss for the first time since the interview. I think she's going to be a really good boss, and I'm looking forward to working with her. She wants the job to be fun and exciting, and she values education. This will be great for me because my primary goal for this job is to supplement my education. I can use any downtime I have to study treatments and procedures within the hospitals system, and I can take many of the continuing education classes that are designed for RNs to get a jump start. These along with the experience and exposure to the job will be worth much more than the pay.
Yesterday was also the first time that I really got a taste of the bricks to bandaids. Sure I've dealt with some people's reactions, but less than 5 minutes into orientation I could already see huge differences in the industries. I'm not talking about patient care to building, or any of the extremely obvious stuff, but about the employer/employee relationship. The orientation opened with the heads of every major department in the hospital saying hi. Everything they said to us was about the hospital family, and how important we were to them. They told us about a breakfast they host after we have been working there 90 days to hear our opinions and feelings about the job and the facility. We do this again after 6 months. As a bricklayer, I met my bosses a total of 4 times between both of them over a period of 4 years. Two of them were one sentence conversations, the other two were the typical negative jokes you hear on a construction site. Neither of those bosses were even at an equivalent level as the ones I met yesterday. I know it's probably just for show, and they likely don't give a damn about my opinions, but it does say something that they go through the effort of showing up.
The other stark contrast is the lunch after 6 months of employment. They chose the 6 month mark because they feel at that point you're settling into your job and comfortable enough to open up about what you've seen. As a brick layer at 6 months you were wondering which day you were going to get your layoff check. The hospital has a goal for employee retention. They want it, they work for it, they understand that if you're good to your employees they'll be good to you. This concept was completely missing in the union. You didn't keep your job by being good, you kept it because you had some hunting land one of the foremen liked. They didn't educate and train employees with long term goals in mind, they used you to fill a gap. I know ultimately that any job will only keep you around if they need you, but the long range planning of the hospital is an unbelievable change from the short sightedness displayed by the union companies I worked for.
So far, nothing but good changes that I can see.
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