Certified nursing assistants are necessary as the population ages, but the work isn’t high paying. How do health-care programs create faster pathways toward good jobs?
Nursing assistant certification can get students through a program and into a job in a few weeks. But the value of those certificates tends to be low, and there’s no clear path to advancement, according to health-care and workforce experts.
While the work certified nursing assistants, or CNAs, do is critical, the reality of the job can make it undesirable. In many cases, CNAs are paid barely more than minimum wage. Nationally, the typical wage for a CNA in 2018 was $13.72 per hour, which comes out to less than $30,000 per year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“One solution to that problem is to help people get out of those jobs,” said Michelle Van Noy, associate director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University. “But that doesn’t affect the problem itself.”