My wife is a long-time hospital nurse, and she will be the first to tell you that hiring a nurse today is a much more tedious and time-consuming task than it was back in the day. Entry-level educational requirements are higher now, for one, and the whole hiring process at her hospital (which used to be relatively quick and straightforward) is now both tedious and time-consuming. Not surprisingly, this leads to an on-going shortage of nurses, with significant job-hopping from one hospital floor to another, from one facility to another, or from one organization to another. And surprisingly (or maybe not) the "new and improved" hiring process hasn't necessarily led to an improvement in the overall candidate pool, and in at least some cases has caused a noticeable decline.

As to "you don't have to do it again every time you switch jobs", nurses are often required to go through continuing education just to keep their licenses current. But making the jump from one type of nursing specialization to another, or even upgrading from an RN to a BSN (often required today if you want to keep your job - probably the exact same job that you've already been doing for ages) can be quite grueling - almost like starting over. In one recent case, a well-respected fellow nurse upgraded her education only to be to told that even that was no longer considered sufficient. She was already doing management-level work but didn't yet have the official title or the pay, and was told that she needed to go up an additional level in education in order to get that, so she just bailed - decades of experience walked out the door for no good reason.