Guest Post from Shayne Foley, Author of The PA Blueprint and 10% discount with PROMO CODE:  PACents10

Hello, fellow PA Cents fans!  I’m Shayne Foley, PA-C, professor, preceptor, blogger and co-author of The PA Blueprint. Here’s the message that I want to help spread: You get to make choices about which path you take during your PA career. You either choose a Path of Prosperity or the Status Quo path.

With approximately 50% of PAs experiencing burnout at some point during their careers, along with massive student loan burdens and a lack of financial acumen, it’s easy to start and then continue down the Status Quo path. Along this Status Quo path, you have a moderate amount of success on most fronts. However, you play more of a passive role in how your career advances, how much money you make, how quickly your 401k grows, how fast you pay off your student loans, how frequently you experience burnout, how balanced your life and work are, and how fulfilled you feel. From what I’ve seen, most gravitate to this track, and there’s inherently nothing wrong with that, but it’s not optimal.  As someone whose been on that path before, it’s not great.

On the flip side, there’s an ability to grab the wheel of your career and your life, steering yourself down the Path of Prosperity. With some vision, intention, and energy, you can cultivate your best life. As you become empowered by taking control of your destiny, you may be able to accomplish goals such as:

• Finding your optimal life-work balance.
• Paying off over $200,000 of student loan debt in 2 years.
• Becoming the highest paid and/or highest-ranking APP in your organization.
• Getting on track to become financially independent within 15 years and have the option to continue working or not.
• Take sabbaticals and extended vacations to prioritize life over work.
• Start a passion project or side-hustle to scratch your entrepreneurial itch.

I know these things are possible because I’ve achieved all of these within my 9 years of being a PA-C. Although your idea of prosperity may not completely align with mine, I’m sure that you have a vision of what an “optimal life” looks like. 

Many of us daydream about this Path of Prosperity, but sadly, many also fail to take action on their vision. Overcoming the inertia and fear is scary and not always easy, or else we’d probably all be millionaires with six-pack abs, right?  Fortunately, many of us just need someone or something to light a fire in us that burns hot enough to drive us to take that first step towards what we want.

Practically speaking, the best place to start your journey is with learning the basics, as we all did via our PA school educations. Well, my former student, Jordan Fisher and I got together last year and were discussing how there were no great resources to help kickstart your career learning. So, we created such a resource to light your career fire, educating and guiding you to your Path of Prosperity: The PA Blueprint.

In The PA Blueprint, we cover the basics on what you need to know, along with practical tools, tips and hacks to take action with your knowledge.  There are 6 chapters: Compensation, Loan Repayment, Retirement Accounts (401k, 403b), CME, Burnout and Navigating your Work Environment. As you started your PA training with Medical Terminology, we like to think of this book as “Career Terminology” with an action plan. The information contained within these chapters have the potential to save you hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more!), years of spinning your wheels feeling complacent as a slave to your student loans, and countless headaches and frustrations. In short, it is the resource that we wish we would’ve had upon graduation from PA school.