We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jennifer Vonderau a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jennifer, thank you for joining us today and sharing your experiences and acquired wisdom with us. Burnout is a huge topic these days and so we’d love to kick things off by discussing your thoughts on overcoming or avoiding burnout
Burnout in medicine is more than an occasional side-effect. It’s now a problem impacting nearly 50% of healthcare workers, which includes physician associates/ physician assistants (PAs). Burnout is defined by Maslach’s Burnout Inventory as a triad consisting of overwhelming exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of ineffectiveness. And in healthcare, if a provider is experiencing burnout, there is impact on other providers, patients, and entire health institutions.
Shannon Crabtree and I, Jennifer Vonderau, are both PAs who have experienced burnout in our careers. Shannon and I attended Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine Physician Assistant Program from 2011-2013. We became quick friends, shared experiences as roommates in downtown Chicago, IL, and maintained our friendship ever since. We, and our other shared PA friends, find deep meaning and a bond in our mutual experiences as healthcare providers. We’ve laughed over odd patient interactions, held each other’s frustration with healthcare logistics and limitations on equitable care, given each other space through patient deaths and challenging experiences, and learned from each other. Our friends and us, too, work in a variety of health spaces. Shannon has been a PA in an urgent care, emergency room, breast oncology clinic, and hematology and oncology clinic, as well as worked as PA faculty at Northwestern (our alma mater) and North Central College. I’ve worked in general surgery, abdominal transplant surgery, and as PA faculty at the University of North Carolina. We’ve had friends in outpatient orthopedics, neurosurgery, urgent care, gynecology and oncology, pediatrics, critical care medicine, and more.
Even with our robust friendships and shared commitment to medicine and health service, we experienced burnout separately, in different times, different spaces, and with different impacts. To avoid close association with any employers, I’ll be vague but truthful in saying we’ve felt burnout due to poor representation by leadership, unfair institutional practices, overwork and extremely limited support, a lacking of respect or compensation, unfair allocation of work duties, and more. Our burnout has impacted our ability to show up for our families and ourselves, and it has absolutely affected the way we see medicine and the role of each healthcare provider in the workplace.
PAs are extremely important to the function of the health systems in which we’ve worked. Patients, providers, physicians, and other specialists rely on our ability to understand, communicate, and deliver. The PA profession is known for improving health outcomes in spaces where communication, continuity of care, and multidisciplinary teams govern patient outcomes, and those are the spaces we’ve found ourselves in. The PA profession is very susceptible to burnout due to the variety in the duties we’re assigned and the importance of our ability to execute those responsibilities without error. That said, we feel a sense of accomplishment in serving as PAs, and we have a deep drive to represent our profession with integrity and strength.
We want to help PAs that are new to practice, changing fields, or looking for something else in their careers, since we’ve seen so much through our – and our friends’ and colleagues’ – experiences. We want to help those identify their burnout and feel motivated to seek a solution, rather than discouraged by the profession as a whole. We want to be a resource for other PAs and provide the information we sought when struggling or seeking new opportunities.
We created PA Jobs, LLC at the domain www.findpajobs.com to serve as that resource. At its most basic, it is a resource for job searching through major health systems in each state. But we hope to provide more than that. We want PAs to have a hub of community, guidance, and mentorship to help support each other. We believe it is the PA community, friendship, and self-actualization that allowed us to pivot from places of burnout to a place of creativity, growth, and contentment with our careers. And we hope others can find that too.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
PA Jobs, LLC at www.findpajobs.com is a website endeavor that Shannon Crabtree and I, Jennifer Vonderau, began in the summer of 2024. We purchased the domain at a point in which curiosity about our ability to grow a website founded upon mentorship and guidance for PAs was literally just an idea. The beginnings of developing our website involved establishing with a website host, doing research on the information we’d provide, and getting experience with web design and building. I’ve always been someone who loves a project, so doing this research, exploring web designs, and developing ideas about how the site would look was a fun escape from a job that was overwhelming and dampening my creativity at the time.
In October of 2024, we met at a conference and fully hashed out our brand identity, site pages, and resources. We established a timeline for publication and identified key goals for “going live” on our site. We worked together for hours and left with goals for each other to accomplish over the next few months.
The PA Jobs website went live in December 2024, and since then we’ve expanded our online resources to include 1) job boards from major health employers by state, 2) specialties pages that provide resources for PAs in common medical specialties, including CME, networking opportunities, and top employers, 3) information about non-clinical roles for PAs in education, administration, and research, 4) unique roles for PAs with specific patient populations, 5) a centralized listing of PA fellowships in critical care, surgery, and internal medicine, 6) a resource for PAs looking to receive additional credentials in their practice, 7) a career resources page with links to textbooks and other items that we find useful in practice, 8) information about research, publication, and presentation as a PA, and more. We also offer services for PAs, PA students, PAs interested in faculty positions, and new graduates looking for career guidance, CV editing/ writing, and mentorship. We have a community page for groups to speak together and share ideas. And we have a blog, where we post about twice a month on topics pertinent to PAs in practice.
We have written two guidebooks that we have self-published on our site and through Kindle Direct Publishing – a CV Writing Guide for PAs and Hack the PANCE: Test Taking Strategy from PA Exam Writers. These guides have been well-reviewed by our former students and new readers, which is really fulfilling! We are in the process of writing a guidebook for new PA graduates to help with the numerous decisions, logistics, and learning required when starting a new job as a PA. This guidebook is the one we’ve wanted to write since considering creating a PA Jobs site, so it’s really important to us that we provide a great resource and deliver a good product.
We see so much potential in the website space to grow what we offer to the PA profession and our peers. There is very little centralized support for PAs in practice; so much of what we learn as PA students is tailored specifically from our PA program, and once we graduate, it can feel like the support just stops. We hope that gap can be better bridged, and we hope to foster advocacy for PAs new to practice to garner the support and resources they need from their employer to become the excellent provider they hope to be.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Creating and growing PA Jobs, LLC at www.findpajobs.com is still a journey we are very much on. We are still learning the best way to market ourselves, provide resources PAs are looking for, and expand what we provide. But it has also been immensely rewarding working on this business and watching it grow.
Obviously, working as PAs and knowing a large network of PAs has been hugely impactful in our drive to develop PA Jobs. Our hope to support our peers was probably driven most by our time serving as PA faculty. Serving as academic advisors to students who are so hopeful and eager to become excellent providers is very fulfilling, and I think it’s natural to want to advocate for those students and improve the profession in which they hope to practice. We really, really want to see PAs have success on their terms.
Additionally, I do believe a strong work ethic has made this all possible. Both Shannon and I are very efficient creators and have been responsible for a wide variety of work duties in our various roles. But serving as PA faculty has been huge for developing the understanding of what it takes to create a useful resource. We’ve used our experiences as educators to identify the gaps in support for PAs, both new graduates and those established in the workforce, to tailor what resources our website provides.
Lastly, I think creativity has been extremely important in persisting in this journey. It is obviously exciting to consider starting a business and promoting a product you think will help those around you. But there is also a lot of work, including a lot of relatively boring work, that goes into creating something. The ability to see the final product and the impact of sequential effort is really important in being able to persist in something. Allowing creative thinking and dreaming to drive periods of work after kids bedtimes, or on the weekend for a few hours, is necessary to actually achieve the end result you’re looking for.
If you’re early in your journey working towards a similar aim, the advice I have, based on my own experience, is to identify what you know well, work diligently in that space to learn both its breadth and limitations, and then allow your creativity to create a solution. Let your mind rest in the creative space as often as it does in the challenges, if not more. Optimism and hope drives production and change, in my experience, and optimism stems from a place of creative (and safe) expression.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
We are looking for collaborators who are hoping to grow with the PA profession, offer support to other PAs, learn from each other, provide a resource for healthcare providers, and share their journey. Every month we create and publish a monthly newsletter, titled PA Jobs Career Mentorship and Education (PA Jobs CME), and we’ve published six issues so far. Each newsletter features a “Mentorship Spotlight” from a PA who can offer advice, guidance, or a compelling story from their career experiences. We’ve featured stories about switching specialties, working in non-clinical spaces, negotiating PA compensation, working in PA education, and more. We’ve also featured input from non-PA professionals who can share expert tips for PAs looking to improve their career or their own wellbeing.
We hope to collaborate with dozens, and later (hopefully) hundreds of PAs in this journey to share the PA role for other PAs looking to learn from each other. We are active on LinkedIn (@PAJobs), Instagram (@pajobs_community), Facebook, and even produce training videos on YouTube (@PAJobs_Video). We can be contacted on our website www.findpajobs.com or through email at contact@findpajobs.com.
Our slogan is “Committed to PA Career Progression,” and we know that’s only achievable through knowing and supporting PAs!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.findpajobs.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@pajobs_community
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pa-jobs
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pajobs_video
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
