CHEYENNE — For years, Ashley Myers juggled low-wage jobs and single motherhood, barely making ends meet.
Today, she’s a highly specialized nurse working in a Cheyenne electrophysiology lab on a path to prosperity she couldn’t even have imagined when she started training to become a certified nursing assistant.
“The opportunities are endless with nursing,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “And that’s a great thing. I think that’s what’s appealing to a lot of people going into nursing.
"You could work in a school setting you could work in a rehab setting. And you can work in a lot of specialties.”
The electrophysiology (EP) lab where Myers works is just one of several high-dollar specialties in nursing. It’s where the electrical systems of the heart are monitored in real-time, helping doctors diagnose and treat heart rhythm disorders.
“EP is highly specialized and AI is never going to take that away,” Myers added. “There’s just no way. It’s not going to happen. So that’s what’s appealing with nursing and even the health care field. You’re just going to have so many opportunities.”
Myers is part of a growing wave of Americans, many of them women, who have found a surefire ticket into high-paying jobs in a sector that has lots of opportunities to scale and grow in different directions.
Salaries, meanwhile, have grown by leaps and bounds, Myers said. She is seeing starting salaries that are now $20 per hour higher than when she started.
Median wages for registered nurses are around $94,000 in the United States, according to the U.S. Labor Department. That compares to $49,500 for all occupations.
Nurse practitioners and those with advanced degrees have median wages around $132,000, according to Labor Department statistics.
“I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but our hospital, during COVID and like toward the end of COVID, they did a nurse retention bonus to try to keep the nurses, because everyone was trying to go travel (nursing) and stuff,” she said. “Pretty much all the nurses got a retention bonus.”
Myers said her retention bonus was $10 an hour on top of an already attractive salary.
Training Crunch Underscores Trend
Salaries appear poised to keep rising, too, thanks to the demographics the sector faces.
Not only are aging Baby Boomers swelling the patient load for hospitals and clinics, but many of them are also walking out of the doors of those same clinics and hospitals as retiring nurses.
Meanwhile, limited training slots mean it’s difficult for the sector to address acute shortages or rising demand quickly.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is forecasting 40% growth in demand for advanced-degree nurses from 2024 to 2034. That compares to a baseline of 3% growth rate across all occupations.
Meanwhile, registered nurse employment is only projected to rise 5%, which exposes a considerable gap between capacity and demand.
That has people like Myers seeing their profession as essentially recession proof.
Nursing schools across the country and in Wyoming, meanwhile, are routinely turning away qualified applicants because they lack capacity for more students.
Sherrill Smith, dean of the Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing at the University of Wyoming, told Cowboy State Daily her program can admit roughly 60 new students per year, while 120 to 200 students want to be in the program at any given time.
Some of those individuals aren’t qualified, Smith said, but many are, and have to find alternate pathways into the profession, or switch to a different sector.
The biggest limiting factor is that students must be placed in a clinical setting, Smith said, and there’s only so many of those available in a state like Wyoming, where cows outnumber people.
But she also has to maintain a ratio of one instructor for every eight students, which is another huge limiting factor, particularly right now.
“Our faculty have to have a master’s degree to teach,” Smith said. “So one of the reasons they are leaving is because the new grads coming out with a bachelor’s degree are making more than our faculty are.”
Federal legislation is being considered to try to close that pay gap, something Smith believes is particularly crucial for states like Wyoming.
“The faculty shortage is most severe in the West,” she said. “I think it’s because we’re more sparsely populated. We just don’t have as many people.”
AI Proof, Too
Behind Myers' personal success story is yet another success story for Wyoming.
That’s because Myers is a graduate of Climb Wyoming, a program that has worked with more than 12,000 moms over the past 40 years, placing them in lucrative careers that enable them to support their families.
Health care is one of several career choices selected because it will be lucrative long-term, Climb Wyoming Executive Director Katie Hogarty told Cowboy State Daily.
“We know that those careers offer, just like Ashley was saying, a really strong career ladder,” she said. “And those entry-level certified nursing assistant jobs can lead to specialty degrees and highly trained nurses. The sky’s the limit, we feel like, through the CNA training.”
Since inception, Hogarty estimates Climb has saved Wyoming $138 million in reduced benefits that would have been paid out, by placing single mothers in lucrative fields with long-term prospects, so they can support themselves and their children.
“Right now, we’re really focused on health care jobs,” Hogarty said. “Also trades. We’re really focused on skilled trades and truck driving trainings. Those are jobs that won’t be taken by AI and will really support the workforce needs in Wyoming right now.”
Climb Wyoming has been integrating AI training into its program, Hogarty added.
“We know it’s going to be part of all sorts of fields,” she said. “And we want to help equip moms with the skills they need to be successful in the long-term, in jobs that will be able to withstand this transformation we’re experiencing now.”
Myers, meanwhile, is excited about the transformation she believes will be on the horizon with AI tools in the electrophysiology lab where she works.
“It’s giving us better imaging tools so we can predict things better,” she said. “I’ve been reading a lot about the AI tools that are coming up, and the imaging quality is just a lot better. So that’s exciting for us, because it’s a great tool, but it will definitely never replace us. We have to have people to do this work.”
Other States Recruiting Wyoming Nurses
In Wyoming and beyond, nursing is poised to remain one of America’s most promising paths to prosperity. It’s a profession shielded from automation, buoyed by inexorable demographic trends, and rich with opportunities for specialization and advancement.
Whether the nation can fully capitalize on the potential for this transformative career, however, will depend on whether enough training doors can be opened into the profession, to meet not only the existing shortage, but the even greater needs just ahead as more Boomers retire.
If education capacity remains capped by lack of clinical settings, while demand for nursing care stays high, shortages will continue and salaries will spike, contributing to escalating medical care costs.
The problem will be particularly in the Mountain West, where the profession is already facing substantial shortages.
“Every hospital in the state is waiting for nurses,” Smith said, adding that Wyoming has applied for funding to help support nursing workforce, behavioral health workforce, and EMTs, three areas where the state is particularly short.
“As we see a continuing population of older people and older people with chronic health conditions, the number of nurses is going to continue to be important,” Smith said, adding that it’s a career field with good pay scales, where getting a job at the end of training isn’t problematic.
“We are getting flyers sent to us from across the country to post for students about open positions for nurses.”
Those positions often come with signing bonuses and other perks.
It’s just one more reason Smith believes Wyoming’s training crunch for nurses isn’t going away any time soon.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
