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| Dr Sarah Page-Jones. |
Who are you and
how do you fit into the world? If you are a veterinarian or vet nurse, your
career is likely central to the answers to both of those questions. While that
can be a huge strength, it can also be a weakness, according to veterinary
management consultant Sarah Page-Jones BVSc CertSAS MBA MRCVS.
For example, it
can make changing careers extremely challenging, if not impossible for some
people. Dr Page-Jones knows about this first-hand. She had to reinvent her
professional identity due to a physical condition.
Now a consultant in
evidence based veterinary management, she is the co-author of an intriguing
paper, “Career identity in the veterinary profession”, published in the Veterinary Record. The study raises some
important questions about career identity in veterinarians and veterinary
nurses.
Why did you become a veterinarian?
I became a vet
because I had always been drawn towards animals and pestered my parents for a
pet from an early age. I don’t know
where my love of animals came from, my family didn’t own pets and my Dad was a
telecom engineer and my Mum a classroom assistant. But as I got older I started
horse riding and by the time I was doing my exams at 16 I was set on becoming a
vet and by then we had moved on from a succession of rodents to being proud
owners of a cat called Chips! It wasn’t
easy to get into vet school because of my background but some very helpful vets
and farmers allowed me to get the experience I needed and I was offered a place
at Liverpool University in the UK.
How did you come to investigate career identity in
the veterinary profession?
Congenital hip
dysplasia meant that I had extensive surgery as a child and by the time I was
in my 20s I had osteoarthritis. I had to
undergo further invasive surgical procedures in my early 30s but unfortunately
I was left permanently disabled. I
carried on pursuing my love of small animal surgery on a part-time basis for a
couple of years but then I had to stop clinical work altogether. This led to me moving into a clinical managerial
role and subsequently further away from clinical work. I had always identified myself as a vet and
the fact that I wasn’t one anymore meant that I had quite a bit of work to do
to sort out who the new me was.
My new
professional identity is as a veterinary management consultant which I’m
comfortable with and I’m really happy to have found a non-clinical role for
myself within the profession, hence my interest in others’ career identities
and my aim to increase understanding in this area and assist with identity
related issues.
What is career identity?
The answers to the
questions ‘who am I?’ and ‘how do I fit into the adult world’ tell us about our
overall identity. This relates to the
kind of person we are in everyday life (at home, at work, with friends and
family, in social situations etc.).
Furthermore our attitudes, values and beliefs underpin our identity and
have a significant impact on it. Our
career identity makes up part of the whole so the questions become ‘who am I at
work?’ and ‘how do I fit into the world of work?’
A very basic
example might be “I’m a conscientious, competent and hard-working small animal
first opinion vet who’s caring and empathetic with high moral and ethical
standards working in a privately owned veterinary hospital. I behave with integrity and believe in
fairness”.
You state that "the strength of veterinary
identity and feelings about what it means to be a veterinary professional
cannot be underestimated." Why do you think this is so strong in
veterinarians and nurses?
From my research
it seems that many vets and vet nurses decide on their profession early on and
stuck to it; in fact many participants were unable to remember a time when they
were not partly defined by the profession.
In this situation
we grow up telling people that we’re going to be a vet or vet nurse and then
that we are one and hence the formation of our identity through adolescence and
beyond has a veterinary identity at its heart.
People that have done this tend to have great difficulty imagining doing
or being anything else. In this case it
appears that the person’s professional identity also goes a long way towards
answering the questions related to overall identity.
This means that
being a vet or vet nurse impacts who we are and how we behave in the whole of
our lives, particularly in relation to our attitudes, values and beliefs. When we say to others that we belong to the
veterinary profession this is actually short-hand for explaining the type of
person we are.
You observe a number of potential advantages of
this strong identity. What are these?
There are many
advantages to a strong identity; it facilitates the development of a
consistent, congruent and authentic self and the generation of meaning and
social standing. In this case people are
very clear about who they are and how they fit into the world (and in fact
rarely have to think about it since it’s virtually innate). People who go through life wanting to be a
vet or vet nurse, enjoy training for that occupation and then enjoy fulfilling
veterinary careers are usually really happy and fulfilled individuals.
What are the potential disadvantages?
Unfortunately
there are a few disadvantages with a strong identity, it certainly makes
negotiating unexpected events, outcomes or socio-cultural changes that threaten
identity particularly challenging. An
unexpected event could be something like my experience with disability and
socio-cultural changes could be related to industry consolidation and
corporatisation. Vets and vet nurses
usually move jobs to try to find an environment that’s compatible with their
identity and avoid companies where practices and initiatives threaten who they
are.
A strong identity
means that people tend not to contemplate changing who they are professionally
to match the organisation, but as the ability to move to a different
organisation becomes more difficult (due to fewer options) this may have to
change. This means that vets and vet
nurses may have to begin experimenting with identity reconciliation where
people change their career identity to fit with the organisation they are part
of rather than working against it. This
will be a huge undertaking and is likely to cause profound internal turmoil for
many as ethical dilemmas come to the fore and people continually question
themselves as to whether management sales pressure is impacting their clinical
decision making.
What are the potential impacts on the psychological
wellbeing of vets and
nurses?
This means that
those people who have to negotiate unexpected events or feel their identity is
threatened by changes in the profession can struggle to cope and this can
negatively impact wellbeing. This is
likely to affect more people as the corporatisation of the profession continues
apace. Another potential issue is that
lots of us set very high standards for ourselves related to our underlying
attitudes, values and beliefs and if we don’t manage to live up to these (in
our own opinion) this can also be a cause of significant psychological
distress.
Do you believe career identity is something we can
manage in a way that can be adaptive, but not selling out one's principles?
I do believe we
can negotiate questions of identity and become more adaptable but not without
considerable effort from universities, organisations and individuals. We have to begin teaching students with
contemporary business in mind and assist them to cultivate a more flexible
identity perhaps partly based on commercialism and interpersonal competence
with altruism and social justice becoming less pronounced.
Organisations have
to work with employees to begin to understand their attitudes, values and
beliefs and to work towards organisational and employee identity congruence in
order that vets and vet nurses might consider aligning themselves with
organisational goals.
There is also
considerable learning and work to be done by veterinary professionals, this
might begin with the acceptance that ethical issues cannot simply be divided
into right and wrong with businesses that seek to make a profit being wrong and
we as caring professionals being right; it would perhaps be helpful to accept
that ethical and moral standards exist along a continuum and will vary between
organisations and veterinary professionals but that jointly working towards
greater mutual understanding and compromise will provide universal
benefit.
Thank you Sarah for your time and these insights! Details about Sarah's consultancy can be found here.
Reference
Page-Jones, S.
& Abbey, G. (2015) Career identity in the veterinary profession. Veterinary Record doi:10.1136/vr102784
