Why do nurses seem to be so good at transitioning to successful health care and nursing-adjacent careers?
Well, even if you have been an RN for only a year or two, between your time in nursing school and on the job, you should be a walking bundle of much sought-after employability skills. Nurses’ training, experience, and natural or acquired abilities make them MVPs in all sorts of settings. They’re known for their communication expertise, leadership and organizational skills, high EQs, aptitude for teamwork, and being problem-solvers who can identify priorities during a crisis and quickly—but calmly—handle them. During every shift you deploy talents that can help you start your own business or become a prized employee at a startup, a health insurer, a hub services provider… or a professional MMA fighter.
Among the many nurses who have moved into alternate careers, our Nurse of the Week, California NICU nurse-turned-software engineer Alice Kim is an outstanding example of an occupational reset: Alice now combines her dedication to health care and drive to resolve systemic problems with a growing collection of mad coding skills!
DailyNurse met with Alice to learn how an NICU nurse ended up as a programmer with her own GitHub account and a position helping Trusted Health act as a matchmaker between nurses and nursing job opportunities.
DailyNurse: Let’s flashback to your life before you became enticed by coding and software engineering. You originally worked as an NICU nurse?
AK: I was a nurse for almost a year and a half. I actually went into high school wanting to be a nurse and never thought that I would be doing anything else!
DN: What did you like best about working in the NICU?
AK: Probably my favorite part was seeing babies go home. Or at least preparing the discharge, because I worked the night shift. That’s always a great feeling, seeing the parents be really excited and getting to say, “bye, don’t come back!”
DN: So, when you started working on the NICU, what was the first thing that made you think, “There has to be a better way to do this?”
AK: I saw a lot of issues that just felt like they could be more modern. I think the first time that I said, “you know, we could modernize something,” was when I heard almost all of the nurses complaining about the EMR (electronic medical records), and how it’s confusing. That’s kind of where it kick-started.
I began to notice different aspects of just working in a hospital that for some reason, haven’t been modernized. And hearing people talk about things also made me aware of problems. A lot of people brushed off the issues, but I kept thinking, “if we could improve on these things, it would be cool to be a part of it.”
DN: So you wanted to get involved in helping to resolve these problems, whether it’s usability issues with the EMR or staffing. You began to learn coding while you were still in the NICU. When did you finally leave nursing?
AK: I left to study coding full-time and went to a coding boot camp, which was about three months long. And I got my first coding job two or three months after that.
DN: Wow, that’s fast!
AK: Yeah, I got lucky. My first coding job was outside of healthcare, but I had known that I wanted to end up in healthcare at some point to tackle the specific problems that I was noticing. So it’s really cool that I ended up at Trusted because, you know, one of the problems we are tackling is the staffing issue. It’s super cool to be able to be a part of that solution because that’s kind of what I wanted to do from the beginning.
“It is hard to really muster up the confidence to make a big jump. For me, I found that confidence when I decided to trust not in the outcome, but in whatever my strengths were.”
DN: What are you handling at Trusted Health?
AK: One of the things our team is doing is build out different parts of the experience of matching a nurse with a job. Right now, we’re doing travel nursing, building out the tools that the nurses will use to find a job. There’s a lot of other stuff that happens in the background, but essentially, we’re working on the process of matching up nurses to different types of jobs based on whatever criteria they’re looking for.
DN: How long have you been at Trusted, now?
AK: I just reached my one-year anniversary.
DN: Oh, my gosh, you had a baptism by fire! You started at Trusted during the first surge of the pandemic?
AK: Yeah, shelter in place had just started, right when I got the offer. So, by the time I started, we were already seeing these surges, and the hotspots were going everywhere.
DN: So you’ve been working at pandemic speed from day one. Well, anything after this should be cake! What parts of your nursing education and experience are most useful to you now?
AK: I would have to say, adaptability is a big thing. As a nurse, you are required to adapt to all of these fast changes that occur—and it’s the same with engineering—a lot of changes happen, and a lot of new things are constantly coming out.
Another thing is being able to learn something really quickly. That was something that I had started to learn as a nurse, and it got even more solidified as I transitioned into engineering.
“Adaptability is a big thing. As a nurse, you are required to adapt to all of these fast changes that occur—and it’s the same with engineering—a lot of changes happen, and a lot of new things are constantly coming out.”
DN: We’ve long known that many nurses become burned out. So, nurses at all sorts of ages must be thinking, “I can’t do this anymore. But nursing is all I know how to do!” Do you have any advice for nurses in that position?
AK: I think that it’s always daunting to leave the nursing profession because this is a huge change. Even if it’s going from bedside to a more non-clinical setting, it is a pretty big change.
I’ve had nurses ask me about this, and I think the first step is to see if there’s anything that really piques your interest. And then, if it does, you just need to kind of grit your teeth, be brave, and find something that will give you confidence—because it is so daunting, and it is hard to really muster up the confidence to make a big jump. For me, I found that confidence when I decided to trust not in the outcome, but in whatever my strengths were.
“In moving from nursing to a new career, I think the main point is getting started. And attaining that mindset is a key to starting that transition, wherever the transition may be..”
One of the things that I always fall back on is I try and trust my work ethic, and the outcome is not as important to me. If it is a huge failure, as long as you learn something from it or have some sort of takeaway, it’s not really a failure, in my opinion.
In moving from nursing to a new career I think the main point is getting started. And attaining that mindset is a key to starting that transition, wherever the transition may be.
DN: What is your favorite part of what you’re doing at Trusted?
AK: I think the greatest thing is that we have an amazing mission statement, where our mission is to help people everywhere get care. It’s one that really resonates with me, as ultimately, that’s why I wanted to be a nurse. And why I also decided to make the transition.
So, for me, having a company that is mission-oriented like that, it’s just a good feeling. Because I feel like the work that I am doing on a day-to-day basis is having an impact on something personal as well, as you know, for the company.
I also really love that we are supporting nurses. Because I know from being a nurse, sometimes you don’t feel that support. We’re very “nurse-first”. And when I was looking into a healthcare startup, or any sort of health care tech company, it was really important to me that they have that sort of culture. So, finding a company like that has been amazing.
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