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Highly qualified and highly ambitious:implications for workforce retention of realising the career expectations of graduate nurses in England

Sarah Robinson, Trevor Murrells and Michael Clinton, King’s College,
London
Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 16, no 3, 2006, pages 287–312
Although increasing numbers of graduates now enter the UK labour market, therehas been little evaluation of the benefits that this component of the workforce isreported to bring to employing organisations. This study focused on nursing; aprofession in which graduate entry is increasing but potential benefits of moving toall-graduate entry are strongly contested. Career behaviour and expectations ofgraduate nurses were compared with those of diploma-qualified nurses. Career
behaviours were similar but differences were found in fulfilment of expectations thatreflected findings reported for graduates in other employment contexts. Graduatesentered nursing with higher expectations than diplomates but these were oftenunfulfilled. Graduates reported lower levels of satisfaction than diplomates over timeand became less likely to intend remaining in nursing. Implications for increasinggraduate entry are discussed, together with strategies to facilitate bettersynchronisation between graduate expectations and opportunities within the NHSand beyond.
Contact: Dr Sarah Robinson, Nursing Research Unit, King’s College London,
James Clerk Maxwell Building, 57 Waterloo Road, London SE1 8WA. Email:
sarah.robinson@kcl.ac.uk
Recent years have seen increasing emphasis on access to higher Education and
on the importance of a graduate level skilled workforce. Within an increasing
number of professions and industries, holding a degree is a mandatory
prerequisite for entry (e.g. teaching, physiotherapy and occupational therapy), while
for others new degree courses have been developed to enable individuals to gain
skills and a qualification that will place them in a better position in their respective
labour markets (e.g. marketing, HRM and IT). Such developments have led to
increased participation in higher education and to a greater proportion of graduateswithin the UK workforce than hitherto (Elias and Purcell, 2003). This article isconcerned with the growing provision of degree courses as a route to qualificationin nursing, the largest group in the healthcare workforce. While some healthcareprofessions such as medicine and pharmacy have long had an all-degree route toqualification, and others such as physiotherapy have recently joined them, there isa debate about whether nursing should follow suit. The study reported here
specifically aims to identify issues that may contribute towards this debate and, more
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 16 NO 3, 2006 287
© 2006 The Authors.
Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
generally, is an evaluation of the HR implications of introducing a greater proportion
of graduates into a large workforce.
STUDY CONTEXT
In England, most nurses now qualify via a three-year diploma course but theproportion qualifying via the degree route is steadily increasing. Several universitiesbegan offering three-year degrees in the 1990s; the commissioning of these wasgradually expanded and by the late 1990s 7 per cent of nurse qualifiers in Englandwere graduates (UK Ce本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。