Knowing What to Do Is Only the Beginning: Preparing Students for Good Work in Healthcare
By: Lynn Barendsen, Shelby Clark, & Victoria Tse
What does it mean to do good work when the consequences may directly affect another person's health, safety, dignity, or life? When we spoke with healthcare students and employers as part of our Good Work Value Alignment Study, participants universally valued expertise: healthcare professionals need deep knowledge and technical competence. But no one described good healthcare work as expertise alone. One employer offered a particularly rich definition:
“I think someone who does ‘good work’ stands out through a combination of professionalism and empathy. They are detail oriented, follow protocols carefully, and communicate clearly with both patients and colleagues. Reliability and consistency are key—they show up prepared, meet deadlines, and handle tasks without constant supervision. But what really sets them apart is compassion; they genuinely care about patient outcomes and take the extra step to ensure patients feel heard and supported.”
Across our conversations, good healthcare work emerged as an act of integration: knowledge with judgment, competence with care, confidence with humility, and responsibility with an openness to continue learning.
Care is part of the work
Students and employers emphasized technical competence and attention to detail. But participants' examples of exemplary healthcare professionals rarely stopped there. Students described professionals who listened to patients, advocated for them, communicated compassionately, collaborated with colleagues, and treated people with dignity. One student described a professor working to change how people with substance use disorders are treated:
“She has tried to remove stigma around substance use disorders.… I think good work has passion in it for trying to remove stigma from people’s lives and to actually make them feel like a person.”
That final phrase illustrates why good healthcare work cannot be reduced to performing a technical procedure correctly. How patients are spoken to, whether or not they feel heard, whether they are treated with dignity - all of these are essential elements. These aren't additions to the “real” work. They are part of what’s involved in “good” healthcare.
Sometimes expertise means knowing that you don't know
Participants also talked about humility and continued learning. A nursing student explained:
“People who are hard workers are very much… willing to put in the hours into what they need to study and learn, but also can admit when they don’t know something.… You gain a lot of skills by admitting that you don’t know how to do something and learning from others because that demonstrates that we’re not perfect and that we all need guidance at times.”
Employers valued the same behavior. They described promising new graduates who recognized when they needed guidance, asked questions, responded to feedback, and learned from more experienced colleagues. For an early-career healthcare professional, readiness may therefore include something seemingly paradoxical: knowing when you aren't ready to handle something alone.
From the classroom to the clinic
Students valued their formal coursework, particularly when they could see its connection to future professional responsibilities. But clinicals, internships, rotations, and simulations were especially important because they gave students opportunities to use what they had learned with actual patients and practitioners. One nursing student explained:
“I was able to learn a lot about how to do patient care… from clinical.… I feel like I’ve very much learned how to apply what I learned to real life.”
Employers saw the same transition from the other side. They described new graduates who might arrive with substantial knowledge but still need to learn how to prioritize, manage time, navigate workplace systems, communicate under pressure, and make decisions as situations unfold. One employer summarized what gets someone hired as:
“A mix of solid academics, hands-on training, and soft skills, that's what gets them hired.”
Readiness, then, isn't simply about whether someone learned the material. It is about whether they can bring multiple capacities together in practice.
Credentials matter—but they aren't the same as readiness
In healthcare, credentials have particularly clear value. Degrees, licenses, and certifications can provide access to occupations, establish standards, protect patients, and legally authorize people to perform particular forms of work. As one nursing student explained:
“Yes credential is necessary because it is a legal requirement to be licensed as a registered nurse.”
Yet participants did not equate possessing a credential with being fully prepared to do good work. One student said:
“A credential doesn’t always mean a person knows what they are doing.”
An employer similarly emphasized that nursing requires qualities such as empathy, patience, communication, care, and respect in addition to educational attainment. These aren't arguments against credentials but rather a recognition that credentials alone aren’t enough.
What would better preparation look like?
Students and employers repeatedly asked for more opportunities to practice under realistic conditions: more clinical placements, internships, simulation, patient contact, case-based learning, and partnerships between colleges and healthcare organizations. One student wished for:
“more practice with real-life clinical decision making, not just theory or structured checklists. In rotations I’m still not fully confident when cases are messy or don’t fit the textbook patterns.”
Students don't simply need more opportunities to repeat procedures. They need opportunities to decide what to do when several things are happening at once, information is incomplete, another person is depending on them, and the textbook example doesn't quite fit.
Across our healthcare conversations, education provided an important foundation. But readiness continued developing as students learned to integrate knowledge with judgment, communication, empathy, adaptability, professionalism, and humility. One student perhaps summarized that form of readiness best:
“What makes me feel most ready is that I’ve learned how to learn. I can research, ask good questions, and adapt when things don’t go as planned.”
For a field in which knowledge will continue to change and no two patients will ever be exactly alike, learning how to learn may be one of the most important forms of preparation education can provide.