I am a 30 something year old Irish veterinary nurse living and working in Dublin, Ireland. I love my job and working with animals is extremely rewarding. I have wanted to work in veterinary ever since I was a kid.
Life before veterinary
I didn’t take secondary school too seriously and with my mental health is a very bad way, I ended up skipping school for most of 5th and 6th year. I didn’t really want to go into more education after the leaving cert and I did very little study. I picked random courses for the CAO knowing I had no intention of accepting anything if it was offered and after school I started working in retail.
When I turned 19 I figured that there must be a back door into the veterinary industry and that there must be a way for me to get into it without repeating the leaving cert. After some research I found an animal care course and applied. I was thrilled to be accepted but half way through the course I started suffering with my mental health again and dropped out. I just wasn’t ready for the pressure that studying brings. However I did manage to land a job as a dog groomer. This began my very journey into the animal world.
Getting back to education
By this time, veterinary nursing became regulated and nurses needed to be on a register to practice. I found out that after the age of 24 you are classed as a mature student and the leaving cert results no longer mattered for certain courses. I had several years of dog grooming under my belt, running a small grooming business from home. But I wasn’t confident that this alone would get me into an RVN course. I applied to a further education college and studied animal care and then animal science to gain the experience needed to be excepted into UCD to study their BSc in veterinary nursing.
Finally I made it
After 10+ years of grooming, 2 years in college and 4 (+1 gap) years in university I finally got my wish and became a Registered Veterinary Nurse. All my hard work paid off. It had been an extremely long journey but I made it and I was so happy to put on my scrubs and head off into my first job as a registered veterinary nurse.
I still feel like that. Each day when I wake up and put on my scrubs I feel proud of my achievement and the work that I do. I have never felt more at home than when I am at work. I love my job. Truly, I do love being a vet nurse. I am more confident in my ability there than I am in any other area of my life.
Progression options for veterinary nurses
Progression for vet nurses is limited. Your options if you want to stay in clinical work are head/lead nurse or practice management. There are also masters courses in fields such as physiotherapy or anaesthesia. You can get into teaching or sales and some nurses study to become vets. A lot of these options are costly to pursue, for example to study vet medicine in UCD as a postgrad student can cost up to €100,000 and take up to 5 years. Even if you choose not to study and pursue management, the pay scale is limited. There just isn’t any money in the veterinary industry.
After some very careful thought, I am strongly considering a career change.
The reasons for this are
- Veterinary nurse do not earn much. You’re talking up to €45k a year at the very top end of the scale. The average salary being closer to €35k
- Veterinary nursing is physically exhausting. Most people’s knees have a best before date. I personally don’t know any RVNs over 50 years old
- To have remote working options
- To travel
- I want to buy land and start homesteading
No. 4 on that list is a long way off. but No. 1 on that list makes it an impossibility. To put it simply, If I want to get on the property ladder I need to earn more than I currently earn. And the only way I can do that is if I retrain and change careers.
So here I am
That is why I have decided to start this blog. If I want to break into the tech world from a vet background I am going to need a whole new set of skills. SEO, SEM, B2B, HTML, CSS, and so on. These are all brand new concepts to me. I am now and always will be a practical learner. I learn best from doing.
So join me as I write about my adventures, my hobbies, my attempts at learning new skills and my life in general.
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