LPN Students-How to become and LPN

If someone asked  you to describe some “typical” LPN students, what would you say?  Well, unless you replied that you had no idea how to do that, pretty much any other answer you could think of would be wrong.  Because times are changing, and so are the LPN students of today.  Now, thirty years ago, if someone has asked you the same question, you would’ve had no trouble in coming up with a description of the stereotypical LPN student.  You would have said it’s a female, she’s white, unmarried and in her late teens to early twenties.  And you would have been exactly right.

But not anymore.  Walls have been breaking down over the past several decades, people’s views on what are “appropriate” careers for both men and women have radically shifted.  In fact, most people would say there’s no such thing as a “man’s” or “woman’s” job anymore, with very few exceptions, and nursing isn’t one of them.  Nowadays, you see lots of male LPN students.  The demographics of America have also undergone a radical shift in the same time period, and there are also more and more men and women of color entering the field of nursing.

Add in the recent economic upheavals, and that changes the picture even more, making the average age of nursing students quite a bit older than it was back in the 1980s and prior.  Many people are losing their jobs in their late thirties to late fifties, and are finding that despite age discrimination laws most firms consider them past their prime and find ways around hiring them.  These people are looking for a career where they won’t face this age bias, and LPN nursing is one of the best.  There’s such a shortage of nurses that employers can’t turn down people because of age.  All these factors put together mean that LPN students look a lot different than the stereotypical nurse most people have in their head.