AIBU to consider teaching after becoming disillusioned with veterinary work?

I have been a vet for 30 years and earn a third of that Google quote! I don’t know of any vets earning anything like that amount and it’s frustrating that the public don’t realise how low our salaries are compared to doctors and dentists.

But children don't have whiskers and paws and little velvety noses?

Have you considered going out to Saudi or Dubai to be an equine vet? 💰💰💰

Couple of years of that & work on your tan.

My brother went into teaching. He worked in a secondary school in a middle class area. The kids were awful. He had his classroom trashed twice. A girl sat eating biscuits in his lesson and scattered crumbs and bits of rubbish on the floor. When he told her to clean it up, she told him it was the cleaner’s job to do that.

I'm now pet free after having pets all my life, and this is one of the reasons. I use Borrow my doggy now, and get my pet fix that way

I’m over twenty years qualified and earn £54k FTE, but I can’t manage full time hours around family life so i work 3 days and earn just over £30k. I don’t know anyone at all earning £150k as a vet, or anywhere close.

Go for it. You’ve done a demanding professional job for a long time, so transitioning to teaching for a few years will be relatively easy in comparison. Most senior leaders will give you autonomy and respect, you essentially set your own agenda and most behaviour is excellent. You’ll love the sense of being a highly valued professional while being treated with respect and courtesy by your colleagues and the students. (Plus you finish at 4pm and only work 3/4 of the year.)

Vet salaries are one of the biggest myths out there i think. By the time you take their on paper salary and then actually average it out over the amount of hours theyre actually working, when you consider things like over nights, staying late, starting early etc. you're probably close to, if not less than, minimum wage.

I know many people, vets and nurses, who have left the industry. Vets - went into research, another has gone into lecturing, another has set up their own CPD and consultsncy business in a niche area, and a couple have retrained in totally different fields (one in psychology, another in accounting). Similarly nurses I know have moved into things like dog walking/pet sitting businesses, drug/medical supplies companies, teaching (colleges rather than school - animal care/behaviour type courses) and again some total changes of direction - floristry and catering!

As an experienced vet you have an incredibly diverse skillset, but is secondary school really where you want to be? Do you have any contacts in the education sector? Can you afford to take some time out and do some good old fashioned work experience? That brings back memories 😆 I think college/university would be a much better option if youre looking for more respect than youre currently getting!

I love our vets, and have vet friends. I don’t think anyone is ever unreasonable to need a change. A dear friend of mine hit a wall years ago with small animal medicine at a general clinic, she did some extraordinary number of vomiting dogs per day and just had enough, and that was years before the current ‘bills too high’ media stuff. In fact she went into a referral clinic, she was a bit cynical about the work but it meant fewer cases per day and more money, she is one of the very top now so does earn the big bucks but I think if she did t have high outgoings she would have stopped a long time ago. Jobs are hard and if you’ve fallen out of love with what you do, change it - sounds very doable for you.

Seriously? That’s terrible pay.

Work on her tan?

Tell me you dont understand how the vet industry works, without telling me you dont know how the vet industry works.

Equine is a very different specialism to small animal medicine

Its definitely a big factor, i worked for one of the big corporates at the end of my career, you are tied to what products you can use as they do deals with the pharmaceutical companies. Compared to when I started theres hardly any independent vets left

Seriously I am leading a small collection of practices and am the main surgeon for the collection. My FTE salary would be £85K, but because the is so tough I work part time - 34 hours a week.

Usually I'd argue, but given your username - OK, fair play 🫡

I am fortunate in that a couple of my local vets left when the practice was bought out by a corporate, and have now set up an independent practice. They have clear pricing structures and have managed client expectations with regard to services. It feels very personal and much like a vet practice used to, rather than a production line. All the staff seem happy and cheerful. Best of all, my dog loves going there.

I know that they had specialist help setting up from another independent vet practice who has developed a model for vets disillusioned with corporate veterinary structures.

Is this impacting students choosing this path as a career? I recall friends fighting to study at Oxbridge in what was supposed to be a lucrative veterinary career. So it’s a business model change? The same is happening in dentistry in some countries with companies scooping up independent practices.

Lol

I think the corporate/independant vet debate misses the point a bit. I’ve worked in both independent and ‘corporate’ practice and I wouldn’t say the independents consistently outperformed in quality of care or cost to the owner. Much much more important was the individual staff working in the practice - a vet is a vet first and foremost, and their responsibility is to their patient before their employer.

Corporatisation (but also modernisation) has changed the profession in lots of ways - for instance, it’s now possible for vets to get maternity pay above SMP, and jobs without nights/weekends, and paid sick leave - none of which were really heard of in the profession when I qualified - and also centralises some stuff (advertising, negotiating with drug companies) for economies of scale.

Sadly for vets, there will always be owners who can’t pay for the care their pet needs - sometimes it’s poor planning, sometimes it’s bad luck, sometimes they have other priorities, sometimes it’s just life - and it’s really hard to deal with, especially when that situation is framed as the veterinary industry, or the individual vet’s, fault.

I do wonder if the OP had posted about moving from, for instance, dentistry or a paramedic, to teaching, whether the same discussion about the financial motives of her profession would be prompted online. Vets seem uniquely vilified for earning a living from doing an essential job, and it’s exhausting sometimes.

From someone who is possibly the most frequent customer at her local vets, I just want to say, we LOVE you. We think we’ve paid £10k in vet bills in the last 18 months or so and we believe it was worth every penny.

When Flynn (male cat) blocked his bladder, the veterinary director jumped out of bed in the middle of the night on a bank holiday to save his life. He ended up with 2 inpatient stays and plenty of backwards and forwards visits over a month to get it all sorted and the vets were completely wonderful with us. All the nurses know who he is and rush out to say hello when we pop back in for a vaccine/check up. He ended up with urine scalds from incontinence and DH always says he remembers the look on our favourite vets face when she saw it and simply said “I’m taking him out the back to sort this out”- they were cleaning and dressing him for about 30 mins. The appointment was charged at the standard £50, plus the antibiotic cream to take home.

Ian has had a complex series of issues this summer with appetite/eating, CKD and dental issues. Again, multiple visits, complex investigation, they referred us to a specialist to get to the bottom of it. The specialist was also completely wonderful, she took every test under the sun and worked through logically and methodically through a huge amount of complicated information to get us answers and 3 months worth of advice and a plan to get him well. She also clearly actually spent time with Ian and at the end of the appointment said “I just need to give him a big cuddle before he goes”, which we adored (Ian loves cuddles!). Well worth the £3k we paid her! Luckily the dental she advised could be performed by our usual vet, who had to anaesthetise a 13 year old cat with FIV, CKD and a heart murmur, make a plan whilst he was under (first time getting a proper look + Xrays) and then remove teeth etc. The bill was £900 including all his nursing care for the day. We thought it was a bargain, given her skill and expertise and were so so grateful!

Both cats have prescription diets and regular check ups and are greeted with absolute joy when we take them in- some vets/nurses even pop out just to say hi to them and their genuine love of animals is so clear. The receptionists know they aren’t insured and work with us to make sure our bills are up to date- they often will “tidy” a few things, knowing that we are paying directly not the insurers. They also say “would you just like the prescription for that one” when they know we could buy a medication cheaper online, which is very helpful. We trust them implicitly and think of the whole practice warmly and with a huge amount of gratitude.

I’m so sorry you feel this way but just wanted to share because it sounds like you don’t have enough customers who appreciate what you do! I would happily pay a bit more too, if I knew that money was paying the staff salaries, rather than into the corporate owners pockets, it is well deserved.

You dont need a PHD to lecture at a university. If you want to become an associate professor or professor then yes but not for a lecturer/senior lecturer

RVC are advertising at the moment. No PHD requirement but the salary is crap

There is nothing new about a vets services being very expensive, people love having pets but never think about how expensive they can become, the collapse in affordability of vet insurance is also a factor- also pushed by very high prices. 50 years ago I had a pony his field cost £1.20 a week but a single equine flu jab which took 5 seconds cost £5 so over 4 times the cost of renting a field for a week. Large vets are also cheaper than small animal vets.
You cannot be surprised that people baulk at the kind of bills which are now normal.

It's been a while since I worked with teacher training providers etc but they do subject knowledge enhancements (SKE) courses, sometimes funded sometimes not (depending if it's a condition of course entry or not). I think they evaluate the shortage subject and SKE offer every year so chemistry may or may not be in the next batch.

Saying that, most jobs are advertised (and hard to recruit for) just 'science' so going down the biology route wouldn't be an issue anyway I wouldn't have thought. I teach all three to GCSE as a biologist, had a long stint being the spare physics teacher (not the A level teacher but the backup GCSE teacher!) which was fine too. I'm doing a lot of chemistry this year and it's just been a case of doing a bit of reading and reminding myself. If you were good at it when you were at school it soon comes back when you remind yourself!

People believe what they want to believe it seems.
Google 🤣🤣

I was guilty of this until corrected but if people thinj vets are getting this and the average joe is struggling to pay for flea trearment and check up etc it can cause resesentment.